Or is Pepe a philosophical meditation on physicality and language, an attempt to think about the world hippopotamically? The animal’s voiceover dramatises his family’s feuds and battles in epic terms, in Spanish, Afrikaans and Mbukushu, a language native to modern-day Namibia. How he has acquired these human tongues, he does not know: “How do I know these words? How do I know what a word is?