The Hollywood Animal is the first publication from Celebritas, an editorial collaboration between artists Misael Oquendo and Alex Calamos. Created in 2017 shortly after relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles, the project emerged from a shared sense of fascination and estrangement toward the LA art world—its proximity to the entertainment industry, its spectacle, and its peculiar relationship to image-making.
Designed as a visual and textual mediation, the publication (originally circulated as a PDF) features stylized Wikipedia-inspired profiles of celebrity animals—Air Bud, Lassie, Bubbles, Mister Ed—collaged and illustrated to highlight the surreal pathos of their constructed personas. These quasi-biographical entries are paired with a long-form critical essay, “On the Hollywood Animal,” which interrogates how cinema renders animals legible through training, projection, and anthropomorphism.
Blending theory, satire, and visual culture, The Hollywood Animal asks: What does it mean to make the animal speak? And what does it reveal when humans, in turn, perform animality? The result is a digital document that operates as both archival parody and poetic critique—a speculative taxonomy of Hollywood’s nonhuman stars.