The Parrot-Person in Koki, Ciao

Sentimentality Without Oversimplification

Abstract
Quenton Miller’s Koki, Ciao (2025) is a short documentary that features a parrot as a person. In this essay, I will explore how Koki the cockatoo’s status correlates with Mary Midgley’s notes on “person” as a concept. According to her, the most relevant feature of a person is the “sensibility, social and emotional complexity.” ¹¹ Mary Midgley, “Is a Dolphin a Person?” in Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems in Philosophical Plumbing (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 94. ↩︎ Midgley extended this beyond the man-animal binary, which I will examine in relation to Koki, to what extent he could be considered the film’s co-writer and protagonist.

Koki, Ciao may manifest some of the characteristics of sentimentality, yet it does not result in simplistic self-indulgence. It stands against the criticism levelled against sentimentalisation by philosophers such as Joseph Kupfer. To Kupfer, sentimentality is a vice because it “produces the passivity of inactivity by immersing us in our emotions.” ²² Joseph Kupfer, “The Sentimental Self,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 4 (1996): 555, https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1996.10717467. ↩︎ By focusing on the film’s style, I will argue that Koki, Ciao shows sensibility as a result of sentimentalisation. What is more, it does so without the oversimplicity often charged against sentimentality. The film’s sentimentalisation is multi-layered due to its fractured structure. Throughout the five tableaus of photography-based editing, the film’s formal strategies present Koki’s personality as temporarily discontinuous. It balances both anthropomorphism and human decentralisation, yet remains emotionally engaging. Hence, the referral to Koki as a “person” helps this essay foreground how the film carries sentimental weight without becoming overly simplistic.

To give an overview of the short film, Koki, Ciao centres a non-human figure as the protagonist and narrator. As a screenwriter, the cockatoo shapes the film’s flow with his voiceover in Croatian. Koki mainly talks about his past with Josip Broz Tito, the former leader of Yugoslavia, his ex-owner. Such a narrative corresponds with the photos shown to Koki, which also prompt the fast-paced, sharp cuts in editing. However, the archival pictures span decades, which makes Koki a 67-year-old parrot. The immortal cockatoo’s autobiography becomes ambiguous as his identity gets questioned. Nevertheless, the new footage shows Koki, or his impersonator, living in unfair conditions: caged in a zoo, lonely, and bothered by tourists. This way, the 11-minute-long documentary offers an emotional portrayal of the cockatoo. By incorporating historical archives, the film explores Koki’s identity and raises questions about animal rights.