MAN by Steve Cutts: The Animated Short About Humanity and Nature

MAN is a short animated film by the London-based illustrator and animator Steve Cutts, uploaded to YouTube on 21 December 2012. In a few minutes and without a word of dialogue, it follows a single cartoon man as he works his way through the natural world, using up and destroying everything he meets. Cutts describes it as a look at "man's relationship with the natural world". It is his most popular film, with more than 68 million YouTube views by December 2024.

Watch MAN by Steve Cutts

The film moves at speed. The man strolls across the planet, and each encounter with an animal or a landscape ends the same way: something is killed, caged, consumed or turned into a product. Scenes pile up from hunting and fur to factory farming, pollution and waste, until the world around him is a wasteland. The closing seconds deliver a twist that turns the tables, which is best seen rather than described.

Who is Steve Cutts?

Cutts worked as an illustrator at the London creative agency Glue Isobar, on digital projects for brands such as Coca-Cola, Sony and Toyota, before going freelance in 2012, the same year MAN appeared. His style borrows from the rubber-hose cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s and from modern comics and graphic novels, and he uses it to satirise consumerism, greed and modern excess.

MAN opened doors. The musician Moby hired Cutts after seeing it, leading to the video for "Are You Lost in the World Like Me?" (2016), about smartphone addiction, which won a Webby Award and a jury award at the Annecy animation festival. Cutts also made a 2016 couch gag for The Simpsons and later the short Happiness, which won another Webby in 2018. His YouTube channel now has around two million subscribers.

How the film makes its point

The soundtrack is Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King", written in 1875 for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt. The piece gets steadily faster and louder until it reaches a frantic finale, and the animation follows the same curve: what begins as a casual stroll ends in a frenzy of consumption. The music carries the story so completely that the film needs no narration.

Exaggeration is the other tool. The main character is a cheerful everyman rather than a villain, which invites viewers to see themselves in him. The jokes are dark, but that is deliberate. Satire works by pushing familiar behaviour to an extreme where its consequences become impossible to ignore.

The real-world issues behind the satire

The film is a cartoon, but the themes it touches, from wildlife loss to plastic waste, are well documented. WWF's Living Planet Index, managed with the Zoological Society of London, reported in 2024 an average 73% decline in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020. That figure is often misreported as meaning 73% of all animals have disappeared; it actually measures the average change in thousands of tracked populations, and scientists have debated how it should be interpreted. Even so, the broad trend of serious pressure on wildlife is widely accepted.

That is where the film is useful: it does not offer statistics, but it can start the conversation that leads people to look for them.

Why MAN still matters

More than a decade after its release, MAN is still shared in classrooms, on social media and in discussions about the environment. Its compact length and lack of dialogue make it easy to show to any audience, in any language. If it leaves you uncomfortable, that is the intended effect. A practical way to answer it is to look at your own everyday choices, such as what you buy, eat and throw away, and pick one to change.

Sources: Steve Cutts, MAN (YouTube, 2012); Steve Cutts, official site; Wikipedia: Steve Cutts; Wikipedia: In the Hall of the Mountain King; Wikipedia: Living Planet Index.

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