A wildlife photographer's hilariously tragic photo of a captured vole went viral. Then it got turned into a movie poster

Just look at his poor little face. You can see the resignation in his eyes. The knowledge that the game is up, now that he is well and truly caught in the talons of a white-tailed kite. We've all been there.

This brilliantly amusing (yet somehow devastating) photo depicting a recently captured vole staring directly into the camera was taken by wildlife photographer Sha Lu last summer, and immediately went viral. It's now doing the rounds again – and being turned into Pixar-style movie posters, naturally.

"I have been shooting white-tailed kites for a number of years. I am mostly interested in shooting their mid-air food exchange behavior," the photographer explained in a Reddit post about the viral photo last year. "Usually the prey is mostly hidden during the kite’s flight so it is very rare that the entire vole was visible and it seemed to be looking at the camera! It was probably because it was only flying a very short distance, so it didn’t bother to fully tuck away the vole. The photo was then published in the New York Post, Bild in Germany and the Guardian in the UK, among others. It was then shared on various social media and became viral."

When the post resurfaced on Twitter (sorry, X) yesterday, people immediately clocked that the hilariously expressive and hapless face of the vole looked straight out of a poster for an animated movie. Cue several AI-generated interpretations:

Indeed, these posters look just as dynamic as those for the likes of recent Pixar classics such as Hoppers. And it seems fair to say that this one wouldn't look out of place in the comedy wildlife photograph awards.