I've been thinking about my 2021 dream of spindle-legged giraffes walking across farmland -- a dream which was recently brought back to mind because of its connection to the Little Skinny Planet, where "skinny" giraffes are livestock. I noted that in the dream "the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection."
I can't seem to find the post anywhere on his blog, but some years ago (in or around 2009, the heydey of Internet synchromysticism), Richard Arrowsmith starting connecting giraffes with the star Sirius. One of these links was the Toys"R"Us logo, which used to feature a hidden Sirius (if each quotation mark is seen as a tiny lowercase i) and a blue star, and of course their mascot of Geoffrey the Giraffe.
Another of Arrowsmith's giraffe-Sirius syncs was from one of the Harry Potter films. I remembered this as someone having a vision of Sirius Black with a giraffe walking past in the background, and because it was a magical vision the giraffe looked slightly "unreal," just like the ones in my dream.
After a bit of searching, I found the scene, from The Prisoner of Azkaban. It's actually a magically animated painting, not a vision, but the effect is the same: The giraffe walks like a real giraffe but has a slightly unreal quality because it is a painting. Sirius Black himself is not on screen, but the Fat Lady says his name just after the giraffe walks past:
I don't think I ever saw this film, and I only read the novel once, in 2005. Apparently, the Fat Lady (an animate painting) is a sort of gatekeeper who asks people for a password. When she refuses to give Sirius the password, he slashes her painting with a knife, and she flees for safety to a different painting. In the novel, she ends up in a map of Argyllshire (lots of little skinny islands there!), but in the film she tries to hide in a painting of several hippopotamuses grazing on the African savanna, and it is in the background of this painting that the giraffe walks past.
This scene is pretty much the opposite of a planet where all the animals are little and skinny. The Fat Lady (that's what she's called) is obviously big and fat, and I assume hippos were chosen because it would be natural for her to try to hide among animals that are also big and fat. I suppose the giraffe was added just to make the painting look more dynamic, since the hippos aren't really moving around much.
