No, I’m the complete opposite. I am far more interested in animal characters and I find it way more easily to care about and be touched by them. The only books / movies and series that actually make me cry, are the ones about animals/ something happening to animals.
That said, I don’t like movies with talking animals (like the Buddies movies). That’s too childish for my taste. If animals are gonna talk like people, then it needs to be animated in order for me to like it. I love animated movies with animals, monsters and living machines, but I am not typically into animated movies featuring a lot of people, like Frozen. (One exception was Lorax).
I just finished a book (My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman) where the main character lost her grandma, felt ostracized in her own family (aside from her grandma who she loved desperately) and was bullied in school. Spoilers ahead! Don’t read the rest if you wanna read the book.
The book had a lot of humor and was very entertaining, and unputdownable, but as interested as I was in seeing where the story went, I didn’t feel much for the character (other than annoyance at times for being bothersome). The one sentence the author used to say that death’s real power isn’t that it kills people, it’s that it makes people lose the will to live, had more impact on me than reading about her ordeals.
But what made me cry were the two chapters near the end where the dog died. How my tears flowed!
The author used a very powerful technique there, talking about something terrible happening at the start of the first chapter, and all the if only’s the character felt and slowly told the story of what happened, and throughout the first of those two chapters, I kept hoping that somehow something changed so it wouldn’t happen. That was very reminiscent of the novella “Att döda ett barn” (“To kill a child” by Stig Dagerman, (and probably also the novel "The Silence Between Breaths" by Cath Staincliffe which I haven’t read).