the project

ANIMALS IN LOVE

BBC ONE · OXFORD SCIENTIFIC FILMS

Across the globe, Animals in Love reveals the surprising courtship, relationships and emotional bonds that shape animals’ lives.

Presented by biologist Liz Bonnin, the two-part BBC One series combines intimate wildlife stories with emerging science to explore a deceptively simple question: do animals experience love?

From lifelong partnerships and extraordinary parenting to friendship, attraction and loss, the series looks beyond instinct to uncover the complex emotional lives of animals — and asks how much their relationships might have in common with our own. Oxford Scientific Films describes the production as a 2 × 60′ BBC One series, distributed internationally by BBC Worldwide.

5M+

uk AUDIENCE

TOP 30

UK FACTUAL PROGRAMMES · 2015

#18

UK DOCUMENTARY & LIFESTYLE RANKING

7.5 / 10

IMDb RATING

“An impressive new series.”

— Radio Times

Highlights

Animals in Love takes a familiar human idea — falling in love — and uses it as a way into contemporary animal behaviour and science. Across two films, Liz Bonnin travels the world meeting researchers and observing relationships that challenge traditional assumptions about the emotional capabilities of animals.The first film explores the bonds animals form and maintain.

Bonobos reveal the importance of social connection; cotton-top tamarins turn conventional parenting roles on their head; two elephants demonstrate a friendship forged through trauma; and a pair of male penguins provide an extraordinary example of a long-term partnership.

The second turns to attraction, investigating the elaborate strategies animals use to find and secure a mate. Courtship becomes a gateway into evolutionary biology, communication and sexual selection, with science underpinning stories designed to be accessible, surprising and entertaining.

Rather than anthropomorphising its subjects, the series continually tests the similarities we recognise against scientific evidence — exploring where instinct ends and more complex emotional behaviour might begin.

“Filming Animals In Love was an eye-opening experience in so many ways.”

— Liz Bonnin

production

As Series Director and Producer, Anne Sommerfield shaped Animals in Love across both films, developing a series that brought together ambitious international natural-history filming, presenter-led storytelling and emerging behavioural science. Her role across the production allowed a consistent editorial approach to run through the series, from stories discovered in the field through to the finished films. The central creative challenge was to investigate animal emotion without simply projecting human behaviour onto wildlife. Stories therefore needed to work on two levels: as engaging narratives about recognisable relationships and as rigorous explorations of the science behind them.

Working with Liz Bonnin and researchers around the world, the films use individual animals and relationships to make complex behavioural science immediate and accessible. Long-term bonds, parenting, friendship, courtship and mate selection become character-led stories, while scientific research provides the framework for understanding what those behaviours might mean.

That balance gives the series its distinctive tone. Emotional storytelling draws audiences into each encounter, while science continually complicates what appears familiar — revealing both striking parallels and fundamental differences between human and animal relationships.

The result is natural history built around character, emotion and curiosity, bringing behavioural science to a mainstream BBC One audience of more than five million viewers.