The pictographic element of the Chinese written script: 02 (Animal characters)

The characters with the most obvious pictographic element are those for animals.  Here, I give the traditional version first, then the simplified.

    (For those who might not know this:  the simplified script, officially adopted by post-1949 mainland China [The People's Republic of China], was mostly artificially created for cutting down the level of illiteracy -- yes, it's hard for Chinese people, too, to learn their own written script.  I say "mostly artificially created", because a lot of simplified characters already existed in some simplified form or other in real life down the centuries, a sort of unofficial cursive / shorthand adopted by the users.  So, the Language Reform Committee seemed to have taken a lot of their inspirations from the grassroots level -- why not?

    Back in the 1960s, I remember my second sister writing the two halves of the character for "trust / letter" 信 xìn as 亻and 文, which is not on the official list.  After all, the character 這 (zhè / this) has been simplified to 这, with the 言 half reduced to 文, so why not the 言 in 信?  An oversight on the part of the Language Reform Committee?  That's another story to come.)

    Characters for animals:  you will see that the traditional forms are closer pictographically to the animals themselves, but all credit to the Language Reform Committee for trying their best to match the spirit while reducing the number of strokes required to write the characters.

馬 / 马 mǎ / horse

魚 / 鱼 yú / fish

鳥 / 鸟 niǎo / bird

烏 / 乌 wū / crow; black (can't see the eye in the bird)

爪 / 爪 zhǎo (/ [colloquial] zhuǎ) / claw

龜 / 龟 guī / tortoise

龍 / 龙 lóng / dragon

   If you can't visualise the animals from the characters (whichever version), you can google the brush stroke renditions for a more artistically realistic version.