‘A being dedicated to water is a being in flux.’
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
If Disney’s Jungle Book sprang from familiar literary territory in its reworking of an established children’s classic, the exotic, jungle setting broke new ground (within the canon of Disney animation features at least). While Disney’s animal documentaries and ‘true life’ adventures of the 1950s had regularly made use of tropical locations in Africa and Asia, the settings of feature animations tended to be more home grown, gesturing towards Europe in terms of their roots but American in tone and environment. Even where an exotic animal, such as Dumbo, played the lead this was in an essentially American environment, provided with a quasi-realistic pretext by the circus. As we saw in the last chapter, The Jungle Book provided a more fluid imaginative space within which themes and nuances of changing attitudes towards the natural world could be played out. But for a long time The Jungle Book remained something of a ‘one off’, the last of Walt Disney’s films to enter the canon of classics, much loved but, in terms of its distinctive features, little imitated. For two decades after Disney’s death, animation production tended to be conservative in terms of style as well as setting, generally retreating to the safer territory of the past. On the odd occasion where the theme of relations with wild nature achieved prominence, as in The Fox and the Hound, the location chosen was that mainstay for nostalgic American values, the rural homestead community.
All this changed with the new range of animated features produced by Disney from the late 1980s however. The credit for this change, in terms of both organization and support for renewed artistic endeavour, is generally given to the team that surrounded Michael Eisner, when he took over as head of the Disney Corporation in 1987. There can be little doubt that the changes initiated by Eisner ushered in a new creative climate for animated production within Disney that had lasting consequences. But these organizational changes took place at a time when the cultural sensibilities that film narratives both explore and help create were also shifting decisively. The political demise of the Soviet Union, the removal of the barriers separating east and west in post-war Europe, and the end of apartheid in South Africa signalled a world that was more open, where old lines of demarcation and struggle were reconfigured with sometimes bewildering rapidity. At the same time this very openness – whose economic correlative was the phenomenon of globalization – was deeply troubling as well as liberating. Driven by the competitive imperatives of late capitalism, the renewed ‘openness’ of the world could appear rapacious, its intolerance of barriers often manifesting itself in the rapid erosion of the localized traditions that bind communities together, as well as in crass indifference to the intricate long-term effects of ecological damage, where this conflicted with economic gain. The spirit of the age that was emerging at the start of the 1990s was a new form of internationalism, experienced directly through the near instantaneous global reach of communications technology. But it was an internationalism where openness was often experienced as anxiety, instead of optimism. In the wake of some of the world’s most oppressive systems crumbling, globalization seemed to heighten awareness of vulnerability within all areas of life and, at its outer limit, to intensify the feeling that the fate of the earth itself was precarious.
In this new climate, the theme of nature emerged within a variety of forms of popular culture with renewed force. In an influential article published at the end of the 1990s, Leo Braudy asserted confidently that ‘for almost a decade both the popular and political cultures of the United States have been preoccupied with the question of nature’ (1998: 278). Braudy argued that, within popular narratives particularly, this preoccupation with the ‘question of nature’ was manifested in forms whose common features suggested the emergence of an overarching ‘genre of nature’. This genre is characterized by its assertion of both the value and precariousness of an innocence that is persistently associated with the natural world. The late twentieth-century nature genre is ‘energised by a sense of imminent world destruction that results not from war but from the fatal by-products of human progress and success – the apocalypse of trash. … the 1990s seem attached to the assumption that only an untouched and perhaps impossible freshness will allow a new beginning’ (ibid.: 292). We have already examined some of the implications of this renewed desire for an ‘impossible freshness’ in Pocahontas. Braudy’s analysis suggests that the protagonists of these sagas are often typed as ‘primitives’ – Neanderthals, aborigines or aliens who, ‘even when they come from another … more technologically advanced civilization, … retain an indomitable innocence’ (ibid.: 290). But this simple innocence is associated even more frequently with animals and children, the very figures who stand at the heart of the Disney’s animations.
Animals and children are often the incantatory familiars of this commitment to nature, and their fluidity is expressed by a visual preoccupation with rivers, streams, oceans …. Water in particular stands in for the repressed values of nature that must be acknowledged before heroism can be achieved and culture renovated. (ibid.: 291)
Braudy’s analysis is richly suggestive and I will return to particular aspects of it in exploring individual films later in this chapter. For the moment though I want simply to suggest how congruent the sensibility underpinning what Braudy defines as the ‘genre of nature’ is with key elements of Disney’s films. ‘Innocence’ and ‘nature’ had long been the keynotes of value within Disney narratives. Michael Eisner’s changes to the organization and ethos of the Disney Corporation coincided with a period when these qualities would play an increasingly crucial role in the formation of political and cultural sensibilities of the new era. The moment was ripe, in other words, for Disney’s core themes to be redefined with new creative energies that tapped into the sensitivities that were emerging with particular intensity at the end of the century.
A rough index of the extent to which the renewed creative energies associated with Disney animations from around 1990 were harnessed to the theme of nature can be gauged from considering the sheer number of feature animations set in the wild natural world. Between 1990 and 2004, not counting sequels and straight to video productions, Disney was responsible for around fourteen animated feature titles (the figure is disputable because Disney put its name to films made by companies such as Pixar, whose productions Disney distributed but over which it exercised little creative control). Of these films no less than seven are set primarily in the wild. The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), A Bug’s Life (1999), Tarzan (1999), Dinosaur (2000), Finding Nemo (2003) and Brother Bear (2003) are set within an extraordinarily varied range of natural environments and periods of history. We perceive the world in these films through the eyes of creatures in all domains of the animal hierarchy, from ants and fish to extinct species of dinosaur to the familiar repertoire of mammals with more obvious human affinities. But all centre on relationships within wild nature, configured with differing degrees of realism and anthropomorphic sentiment. This concentration on the genre of nature and the apparently inexhaustible imaginative variety it has engendered achieved perhaps its most extraordinary concentration in the five-year period between 1999 and 2004, when five of the animated features produced focused on one dimension or another of a wild natural environment. More than a significant cultural orientation, multiple configurations of the natural world have become almost an obsession. Within this body of work it is also notable how many films have an exotic setting within the tropics. Before 1990 The Jungle Book was, as we have seen, unique in exploiting the potential of an exotic natural location. Since then there have been four films – The Lion King, Tarzan, Dinosaur and Finding Nemo – that have used predominately tropical locations.
What links all these films most strikingly is that they are structured so that young viewers will align themselves with the point of view of animals or even – explicitly in some instances – with cosmologies that centre on sustaining the qualities of the environment as a whole. Many commentators have been dismissive of such structural features – if indeed they are noted at all – seeing them simply as evidence of the sentimental anthropomorphizing tendencies that have marked Disney’s enterprises from the time of the first animations. But it seems to me that the sheer pervasiveness of such features within recent films should prompt a more discriminating and attentive response. For, while these films continue to operate largely within the limitations of a perspective that projects human sensibilities onto wild nature and fosters empathy with cute animals, there are breaks within this dominant mode of representation whose significance is worth exploring. Moreover a number of recent animations appear to be conscious of environmental processes and issues in forms for which there are no real earlier equivalents, even within such a powerful and innovative film as Bambi. It is thus a question of some importance as to whether the adoption of a narrative point of view aligned with animal figures may have the potential to develop lines of thought and feeling that move beyond cosy sentiment. Since exploration of the desire – or fantasy – of a mode of being much closer to nature than modern existence allows lies at the heart of this question, I shall begin by looking at Tarzan, a narrative in which the fantasy of complete human immersion in the wild is given full rein. As Tarzan, like The Jungle Book, is based on the idea of the enfant sauvage, it will also serve as a link to the themes and issues we began to explore in the last chapter.
Tarzan tells the story of a young English aristocrat, Lord Greystoke, whose parents are first shipwrecked on the coast of West Africa while on an ill-fated expedition and then killed by a leopard. The orphaned baby is discovered by an ape, whose infant has also died recently and who adopts the human child as a surrogate for her own offspring. Tarzan is the name bestowed on the young Lord Greystoke by the apes; he is brought up in the ape community, aware of his difference from the other apes but oblivious, for a long time, of the precise nature of his human identity. A chance discovery of the cabin that his parents built after their shipwreck provides him with images of other humans but he cannot understand their full significance. The arrival of a group of English explorers, nominally headed by an eccentric professor who wants to study apes but actually driven by the aggressive instincts of the hunter–guide, completes the first stage of Tarzan’s sentimental education. From this point on, the plot begins to mix adventure with romance, as Tarzan deploys his animal strength and jungle acumen to rescue the Professor’s beautiful daughter, Jane, from a series of dangerous situations. As Tarzan’s intimacy with Jane develops, the European group’s interest in the apes begins to pull Tarzan’s allegiances in two directions. In satisfying the group’s curiosity (and, unwittingly, the guide Clayton’s hidden ambition to capture the creatures) Tarzan betrays his ape ‘family’, exposing the apes by facilitating contact with his human friends. The last part of the film’s narrative can be read as a parable in which crass economic drives to exploit the natural world undermine the credibility of more humane scientific interests. The Professor’s project of observing gorillas gives way to Clayton’s concealed plan to capture the apes for an undisclosed western market, at a price of ‘300 pounds sterling’ per head. In the inevitable happy ending, Clayton’s exploitative aggression is thwarted by the heroic alliance of Tarzan and the jungle animals, while the romantic plot is resolved by installing an unlikely ménage of Jane, Tarzan and the Professor in a restored version of the innocent jungle paradise.
The character of Tarzan is founded throughout on a contradiction that, as in the earlier Jungle Book, reverses conventional expectations about human identity within Western society. Just as Mowgli’s desire to remain in the jungle can be seen as a playful inversion of a normal child’s fear of exposure to the hostile environment of wilderness without human contact, so Tarzan reverses the ordinary relationship between culture and instinctual drives. We are used to perceiving culture as quintessentially human and instinctual drives as related to our animal natures. Within the narrative of Tarzan (particularly evident in Burroughs’s novel but informing more subtle aspects of humour in the Disney film as well) the hero’s culture, gestures and responses are shaped by his relationship with the apes, whereas it is his instincts that mark him off as distinctively human. This dimension is part of the more general fascination exercised by the image (and myth) of the ‘child of nature’ within the Western imagination. But in the film it is also a rhetorical device that estranges us from our normative modes of understanding, edging viewers away from their ordinary perceptions and expectations. In this respect Tarzan and The Jungle Book tend to work rather differently however. Mowgli’s facility for mimicry in The Jungle Book, for instance, is a human instinct that suggests his identity is less fixed, more amenable to adaptation, than those of the other jungle animals whose behaviour he often imitates. But, as we have noted, the animal movements that Mowgli imitates – the dancing bear and the military display of the elephants – are in fact often a pastiche of human gestures. Although I have suggested that this still allows ideas about human relationships with nature to be invoked and played out at a thematic level, the natural world that is displayed here remains quite thoroughly humanized. Even when the film wants to signal the primal ferocity that underlies the tiger’s sinuous grace, it does so by having Shere Khan inspect the sharpness of his extended claws in a gesture more reminiscent of the stock villain of melodrama than of the big cat in a natural environment.
Tarzan’s instinct for mimicry and repertoire of gestures, on the other hand, are deployed to quite different effect. When Tarzan imitates the sound and movement of Sabor the leopard in the film, for instance, he does so within a social context – playfully attempting to scare his ape ‘mother’, a behaviour mode with clear human correlatives. But the actual sound and movements he reproduces are designed to be close to the realistic portrayal of a wild leopard. The animators of Tarzan were generally fascinated by the idea of reproducing animal-like gestures accurately using the human form; indeed they perceived the medium of animation as being uniquely well adapted to the pursuit of this goal. Configuring the human instinct for mimicry in this more realistic form has a potentially different impact to the mode deployed in The Jungle Book; Tarzan’s body is made to go beyond what would be naturally possible for a human being and the effect is to reinforce a strange sense of the otherness of animal gesture. At the same time the fantasy of being at one with animal nature is fulfilled and reinforced.
The capacity of animal gesture to make ordinary human interactions appear strange, and available to be seen freshly, is exploited in other ways within the film of Tarzan. Recently, an important strand of philosophical and social theory, grounded in ecological values, has focused on the effects of sight having acquired privileged status within the hierarchy of the senses. Sight has been granted overwhelming predominance, it is argued, in authenticating knowledge and experience within the modern world (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: 104–29). The privileging of the realm of the visual, which tends to confer power on the observer in ways that distance the viewing subject from the world that is seen and controlled, is often taken to be a major constituent of the estrangement from the natural world that constitutes the experience of modernity. A number of theorists have emphasized the role that senses other than the visual have played in pre-industrial societies, while feminist writers have claimed that the cultural pre-eminence of sight has had a structural role in underwriting patriarchal power.
Seen from this perspective, the scene in Tarzan where the hero first encounters Jane could be understood as having more than lightly comic undertones. Tarzan, lacking verbal means for communicating with the extravagantly befrocked girl he has just rescued, approaches her cautiously on all fours till he achieves an intimate bodily proximity that alarms the bemused Jane. He then proceeds to sniff her from different angles, even progressing tentatively towards lifting the edge of her dress so he can extend his exploration to that most fascinating region for olefactory encounters – between her legs. Jane finally regains her self-control at this point and firmly slaps him down. This little vignette is in part a comedy of manners, playing on the parallels and contrasts between animal behaviours for establishing intimacy and the courtship rituals human males engage in when they attempt to get past ‘first base’. But it also highlights how exclusively human rituals tend to rely on the visual and verbal and, in doing so, opens up a thoughtful space within which the assumptions underlying normative behaviour are made strange and potentially questioned.
The extent to which the animators are exploring new territory here can be gauged by contrasting this episode with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s evocation of Jane’s first intimate encounter with Tarzan. Burroughs has Jane thrill to a primeval struggle between male bodies as she watches Tarzan kill the mighty ape Terkoz in order to protect her. Intoxicated by the struggle, Jane gives way to her primitive passions, yielding to Tarzan in a passionate embrace, before recovering a sense of civilized decorum and pushing him away. The muse of dime-store romantic adventure has Burroughs in thrall here, as he focuses primarily on Jane’s response:
Jane – her lithe young form flattened against the trunk of a great tree; her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear and admiration – watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman – for her. (1990: 174)
The scene – all heaving bosoms and passionate desires, barely repressed beneath the veneer of socially inculcated propriety – offers nothing beyond the stereotyped rhetoric of popular romance. Tarzan’s acute use of his sense of smell is noted in other parts of the novel; here his courtship is rendered wholly conventionally however, the rhetoric of ‘primeval man’ merely adding an exotic frisson to his stock role of countermanding the turmoil of Jane’s contradictory, feminine emotions with the simpler edicts of masculine desire and authority. When the last of Tarzan’s polite advances to Jane has been repulsed, Burroughs takes some delight in informing us, ‘Tarzan of the Apes did just what his first ancestor would have done. He took his woman in his arms and carried her off into the jungle’ (ibid.). It is hard not to feel some relief in moving from this to the Disney version. Burroughs’s rendering of the scene is sealed off within a dramatically enhanced version of the gendered ideologies of his time. In comparison, Disney’s image appears open to the challenge of different ideas and perspectives, exploring the nature–human dichotomy afresh with some brio and wit.
The argument I am rehearsing here would suggest that the more interesting kinds of engagement with ideas of nature that take place in Tarzan depend on the film’s adopting a more realistic aesthetic, in terms of its representation of the natural world, than was the case in The Jungle Book. This enhanced realism does not just extend to the depiction of animal movement and adaptive human gesture however. As with Bambi, the animators of Tarzan took considerable care to render the details of the jungle environment, as well as the movement of the apes in particular, as accurately as possible. Thousands of still photographs and extensive film footage were shot during a field trip to Uganda, where gorillas could be observed in wild habitats, and these images were studied intensively in creating the drawings from which the film of Tarzan was developed. Doug Ball, the Artistic Supervisor for Backgrounds, stated that he wanted the field photography to provide him with as much detailed information of the jungle environment as possible, ‘of the moss, of the vines, of the different types of trees, the bark on the trees, from the smallest details to (information provided by) the longer shots’ (Disney DVD 2000). Whereas, I have argued, the look and feel of the landscape in The Jungle Book is essentially painterly – more specifically indebted to Gauguin and Le Douanier Rousseau – Tarzan merges the cartoon/caricaturist’s art with the realism of location photography.
Films are not still photographs or paintings however, since the impressions they create are sequenced in time and the images are almost constantly moving. The realism inherent within individual frames of a film is rendered more complex than the still images through which it is constituted, as the experience of watching is caught up in rhythms created by camera movement and cutting, as well being affected by the speed with which actions within particular sequences take place. In this respect, the realism of Tarzan, though it takes as its starting point the close observation of the natural world, differs markedly from that of Bambi. The pastoral world of Bambi is composed in a spirit of lyricism; the camera is often still or moves slowly around the forest floor so that attention may be caught up almost as much in the shifting shapes and dappled colours of the woodland environment as in the actions of the protagonists. Tarzan is predominantly an action movie however, and the viewer is connected to its images of a natural environment in a quite different mode. These differences are enhanced by the way the film makes use of technological innovation in the field of animation, in particular the so called ‘deep canvas’ effect that software developments for computer-generated images have made available. Deep canvas enables animators to model a sense three-dimensional space on the screen that accurately adjusts perspective, lighting and contour as the camera moves through a particular environment. The technique is used so extensively in Tarzan that it becomes almost a hallmark of the film. It is particularly effective in rendering Tarzan’s movement through the jungle. As he swings from vine to vine and uses the branches of trees as roadways through the air, the camera appears to follow him – often at breathtaking speed. The three-dimensional contours of the scene are adapted to the constantly shifting perspectives of the pursuing camera with extraordinary facility and accuracy.
The effect, quite conscious on the animators’ part, is to make the experience of movement through the jungle equivalent to that of an extreme roller-coaster ride in a theme park or to the spectacle of watching the most extraordinarily agile skateboarder transform the hard landscape of an urban environment into a dextrously negotiated slalom run. ‘I wanted it to be like a thrill ride’, stated the Art Director, Dan St Pierre (ibid.). Within these sequences Tarzan’s body movements imitate those of surfers and skateboarders, rather than apes. The choice of imagery is hardly accidental, since it associates the film with the kudos of the iconic folk heroes of urban youth culture whilst linking, like a simulated ride, with Disney’s other great commercial empire in the realm of modern childhood – the theme park. In terms of the experience of the natural world that is offered, however, the effect is ambiguous; the impression of environmental realism created by surface detail is transformed, through speed and movement, into a visceral analogue that is quintessentially modern.
The experience that the film offers of time and modernity is important, not only as a selling point in terms of its youth audience but also in terms of what it suggests about how we relate to the ‘nature’ that is Tarzan’s distinctive theme. Time, indeed, is perhaps the most fundamental structuring element within the experience of modernity that separates us from nature. Our vast resources of technologically harnessed energy enable us to condense time in the speed at which we are able to move through our environment. We seal ourselves up, in the process, within our cars, trains and aeroplanes, so that we lose contact with the natural sounds and smells around us. Our use of electricity enables us to live substantially outside the rhythms of natural time, as defined by the seasons, the sequence of light and darkness. Instead we adapt and segment our lives according to the demands of the clock, that mechanical arbiter of time whose emergence within early modern culture so profoundly conditioned the way human experience was organized.
For all the elements of surface realism in its portrayal of the natural world, Tarzan does not provide the viewer with experience equivalent to that of natural time. It is debatable whether any art form can do this completely, though I would argue that some kinds of art (the lyrical–pastoral mode, for instance, with its feeling for detail, slow change and elemental life patterns) are potentially more sensitive to this dimension than others. But if Tarzan transforms natural rhythms into the experience of speed so characteristic of modernity, then it does so in ways that occasionally betray a knowing awareness of its own condition. When the animals accidentally stumble upon Professor Porter’s deserted camp, for instance, we focus on salient features of the camp afresh, from the creatures’ viewpoint, registering their stunned surprise. What greets our gaze – in a staccato rhythm imposed by the jump cut editing – is a sequence of artefacts that epitomize human culture and modernity. Starting with a grandfather clock (shot from an extremely low angle – worthy of Citizen Kane – to heighten its dramatic impact), we proceed to chemical distillation apparatus, a typewriter and a steaming teapot. This brief montage seems to offer, in metonymic form, a resumé of modern civilization – from mechanically ordered time, to science, the printed word and social ritual founded on international, colonial trade. No wonder then, that the elephant’s alarmed response to this shocking tableau of modernity is to ejaculate, ‘The horror!’ to a stunned animal audience. All this is delightfully silly, of course: a ludicrous reconfiguring of the nihilistic despair expressed by the character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In its new context, this is a frivolous aside, designed to entertain Disney’s adult audience. But it does show the scriptwriters’ awareness of more complex issues underlying the film’s major themes and it keeps the audience intellectually alive to the possibilities inherent in reversing animal and human viewpoints. Gazing disdainfully at the scientific equipment sprawled around the centre of the camp, Disney’s young gorilla Terk asks ‘What kind of primitive creatures are responsible for this mess?’
The patter line of jokes is prevented from reaching any deeper levels of suggestiveness, however, by the essentially de-historicized nature of the film narrative. Conrad’s famous line ‘The horror’ was a response to extreme dehumanization, in the context of a particularly abhorrent form of colonial rule, while Burroughs’s novel, alongside the virulent racism that informs most of the images of black Africans, provides a more sympathetic historical rationale for the native humans’ incursion into Tarzan’s territory. The black Africans have migrated as a result of harsh treatment by European colonials in the same, Belgian-run territories that Conrad excoriated. By contrast, the action of Disney’s film takes place in an unspecified landscape of the imagination that is, as the opening song informs us, a ‘paradise’ previously untouched by humans. By eschewing the complications of colonial history the Disney version avoids some of the problems – as well as the positive challenges – encountered in Pocahontas. But as a result, potentially probing lines and comic devices connect only at a simplified, surface level. The real ‘mess’ of modern civilization – and the attitudes towards the natural world that underpin it – can be understood only in relation to the histories of both science and colonialism. But the gorilla’s ‘joke’ is inoculated against probing such connections even lightly by its decoupling from history. Although the Professor carries the apparatus of hard science around with him, he is typed as an innocuous, childlike figure whose ‘experiments’ consist only of observing animals (where his inept movements allow) in a spirit of rapt, almost stupefied, admiration. In the Victorian period where the film is ostensibly set, on the other hand, the most enlightened naturalists who made expeditions to tropical regions – men like Alfred Russel – saw themselves as collectors as much as observers, shooting, poisoning and pinning onto boards as many different species of wildlife as they could manage (Raby, 2001). Disney’s trans-historical, buffoon-like scientist owes more to late twentieth-century wildlife protection movements, formed in response to the prospect of major species extinction and to the cult of the ape inspired by popular conservation sagas like Gorillas in the Mist, than to any real-life Victorian counterpart. The result of this historical sleight of hand, which separates the benign scientific observer of wildlife absolutely from the hunter–collector who shoots and traps animals for the market, is to produce a cosy fiction that, while it enhances the film’s feel-good effect, restricts the degree to which its humour is probing.
A more sustained, and perhaps deeper, kind of exploration is suggested by the way the theme of representation is embedded in the film however. Whereas the potentially troubled relationship between science, knowledge and controlling power is finessed in Tarzan so that it is rendered safe, the power associated with images and looking is a more persistently contested issue in the film. Jane and Professor Porter have come to Africa to ‘look’ at gorillas, as they keep reminding Clayton when he repeatedly fires his gun. Jane records images of the animals she encounters in a series of finely drawn sketches. All this might pass without comment in the film, as human behaviour that does nothing to upset normative expectations. But more problematic perspectives are opened up through an extended sequence in which a baboon struggles with Jane for possession of the sketch she has just drawn of him. It is possible to read this struggle as simply a comic enactment of the anarchic play that is commonly perceived as characterizing monkey interactions with humans. But the issue of who has ownership of the baboon image is treated with frightening intensity, as well as humour, in the film. The young baboon’s attempt to gain possession of Jane’s sketch is supported by the whole of the baboon tribe, who pursue Jane with a ferocity that would appear to place her in mortal danger, were she not assisted by Tarzan’s more than capable grasp. The intensity of the scene makes it difficult to write it off as simple, monkey devilment – as in The Jungle Book – while Tarzan’s handing back the sketch to the baboons, when he and Jane have finally thrown off the pursuit, appears to be teaching the heroine a moral lesson.
The ownership and use that can be made of images of human beings has become a hotly contested issue in recent years, especially in relation to rights of privacy. And in a different, but parallel, vein, the Disney Corporation have long been used to fighting sometimes ferocious legal battles over the right to reproduce images of characters from its films. In this scene – although within an imaginative realm – Tarzan seems to be tacitly adjudicating in favour of the animals’ rights; Jane is made to appear naïve in assuming that the process of representation is unproblematic and that the animal she is drawing is simply the object of her artist’s gaze. The creature turns out to have teeth, as they say, and what ensues is indisputably a power struggle over ownership of the image that we are encouraged to examine from both animal and human points of view.
Although the idea that animals have rights in relation to the images human beings make of them might appear ridiculous, the issues involved here are in fact far from trivial. John Berger’s influential essay ‘Why Look at Animals’ examines the power relationship embedded within the human need for images of animals. Berger reflects on how ‘the animal is distinct, and can never be confused with man. Thus a power is ascribed to the animal, comparable with human power but never coinciding with it. The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man’ (1980: 3). Although animals are distinct they also share many qualities with humans. This ambiguity is at the heart of the fascination which animals hold for humans.
What were the secrets of the animals’ likeness with and unlikeness from man? … All the secrets were about animals as an intercession between man and his origin. …. With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species. (ibid.: 4)
This analysis seems especially pertinent to Tarzan, where the primary interest focuses on images of apes – long considered the closest link between ‘man and his origins’ – and the ambiguous ‘ape-man’. Berger reminds us further, that though images of animals may express a desire for companionship, the power conferred by knowledge simultaneously distances us, making that desire unattainable. Thus, within ‘the accompanying ideology’ of wildlife photography in children’s picture books, ‘Animals are always the observed. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know the further away they are’ (ibid.: 14). The unease that Disney’s Tarzan betrays in the interactions that surround attempts to represent animals would seem to mix awareness of this distance with a sentimental move to cancel it. The bizarre image of the mixed happy family at the film’s ending, which closes the gap between the worlds of apes and humans completely, attempts to heal this aching awareness of separation in a realm of pure fantasy.
This fantasy also represents a shift in cultural values. Although the desire to shed our knowledge and consciousness of ourselves as different might be seen as primarily regressive, it connects to contemporary revaluations of the ‘primitive’ in more critical ways too. Leo Braudy’s analysis of the role of the primitive within the recently evolved ‘genre of nature’ suggests that it expresses a dissatisfaction at the heart of late twentieth-century social experience that is not simply modish and superficial. Disney’s Tarzan is, indeed, an archetypal example of Braudy’s nature-orientated primitive – innocent in attitude, animal-like in behaviour, Neanderthal in culture. The fantasy he embodies does not simply represent an escape from the politically compromised, environmentally anxiety-ridden, world that Braudy sees as prompting the emergence of the new genre of nature. It is also an attempt to reformulate, within an affective domain, the distinctive position of humanity in the process of evolution. The fantasy that structures Disney’s Tarzan, in other words, involves remoulding key elements of the Darwinist inheritance of imagery and thought.
The film signals its intentions in this regard with the opening song by Phil Collins, which asserts roundly that the realms of animal and human constitute ‘One world, one family’. This contention is then developed at a number of different levels within the plot, so that it becomes a virtual leitmotif for the film as a whole. Its force thus becomes something more than that of a simple metaphor. Taken literally – which the sentimental focus on Kala as Tarzan’s mother encourages us to do – the image of ‘one family’ encompassing both humans and apes runs counter to the principle that is the very engine of evolutionary change. Evolution takes place, in the Darwinian model, because organisms adapt within their environments to the point where they represent a break within the ‘family’ containing other creatures of shared ancestry. Species differentiation means that breeding (or creating a ‘family’) with creatures other than one’s own particular kind is abnormal and, in many instances, becomes anatomically impossible. Although the metaphor of ‘cousin’ is commonly employed to indicate evolutionary proximity in the animal world, the more intimate relations implied by the term ‘family’, as deployed within Tarzan, normally take place only within the confines of a single species.
Clearly the extension of the idea of family to embrace inter-species relationships in Tarzan is designed to suggest a positive response to the notion of shared ancestry with animals that so disturbed Darwin’s contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth century. But it goes further than substituting a sentimental wish to identify with animals for the older fear that the bestial within humanity was degrading. The ‘two worlds’ of animals and humans in Tarzan run in parallel, rather than being constituted as a hierarchy. Hence the assumption, inherent within popular understandings of Darwin, that evolution involves progress to higher states of being is countered, or at least pushed to one side. Instead, the image of family not only affirms what is shared between animals and humans as being most decisive, but also implies a sense of equality in terms of rights and respect for non-human life forms that chimes sympathetically with recent developments in ecocriticism and the green movement more generally. This distinctive new attitude is effectively summarized by Tim Ingold, when he urges readers to regard animal species other than human as ‘different’, rather than as ‘failed – or at best partially successful attempts at humanity …. To defeat anthropomorphism we must stop interpreting statements about the disabilities of other species as assertions of their inferiority’ (1988: 10).
The revisionist model of popular Darwinism that is so central to Tarzan can be seen working in different ways within other recent Disney animations. Dinosaur, for instance, opens with the narrator’s proposition (similar to ideas derived from chaos theory that have influenced our recent understanding of environmental processes) that ‘sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest changes of all’. The film goes on to portray a world inhabited by small mammals and dinosaurs that is disrupted by an environmental catastrophe, when the earth is hit by a large asteroid. The plot is thus founded on an event similar to that which is thought to have exterminated the dinosaurs 200 million years ago and changed the course of evolutionary history irrevocably.
As well as being analogous to one of the most dramatic events in the early history of the earth, the film’s central motif of environmental catastrophe is no doubt also designed to resonate with contemporary anxieties. The ensuing flight of the animals, trying to escape the fallout from the asteroid explosion, combines one of the oldest narrative structures, the journey, with the drama of survival that is so central to Darwin’s evolutionary plot. The development of the narrative is hardly realistic: the small mammals have ‘adopted’ a non-aggressive dinosaur that they find as an abandoned egg and the journey itself conflates notions of periodic migration to breeding grounds with the more random movement brought about through the wide-scale destruction of environment. But it does incorporate conflicting ideas about the processes that will best enable the survival of different species within testing environments. In part, these ideas debate human social values – in particular the rival claims of competitive individualism set off against more caring attitudes that prioritize the needs of the whole community. But such debates also have correlatives in the categories devised by ecologists to distinguish between the qualities of pioneer species, for instance, which display dominant, aggressive features in colonizing hostile environments initially, and the species that take over as the environment matures and which coexist in more complex interdependent modes (Eisenberg, 2000; Meeker, 1972: 27–33).
A similar conflict of ideas can also be seen as underpinning the narrative of The Lion King. The film’s framing image of a ‘circle of life’, within which all creatures form an interdependent whole that ensures continuity through the cycle of life and death, is ruptured when a single species – the hyena – acquires dominance. As in Dinosaur, the environmental catastrophe that results from this ecological imbalance is configured in forms that connect with apocalyptic contemporary visions of the precarious fate of the earth. After the usurping lion, Scar, has allowed the hyenas to take over, the landscape is depicted as turning into a desert – resembling those imagined within recent apocalyptic film narratives – in which no larger life forms can exist. But the film does not really engage in any serious way with the processes that underlie profound ecological imbalances. No reason is invoked as to why predation by hyenas should be any more destabilizing within the environment of the African savannah than predation by lions, while the link to climate change suggested by the ensuing drought is a metaphor for moral degradation, rather than being connected to any rational cause in the natural world. The Lion King is, as Annalee Ward has argued, a predominantly mythic narrative, which employs archetypes and rituals, often with strong biblical overtones (2002: 10–32). The film’s literary roots lie in the contest of ideas about ‘kingship’ that animate Elizabethan drama – especially Hamlet and Henry IV – and the animal characters act almost entirely as ciphers for human attributes and psychology, with minimal realistic grounding in the natural environment that serves as a backdrop for the action. Hence, as in the later Pixar animated fable, A Bug’s Life, the film’s connection to ideas about nature, as opposed to human society, is actually rather limited.
By contrast, however, Pixar’s most recent offering under the Disney label, Finding Nemo, though also a psychologized morality tale in which animal behaviour is inflected with primarily human motivation, connects with the natural world in much more varied and richer forms. It will therefore be the subject of the last part of this chapter. The most distinctive single characteristic that defines the natural world portrayed in Finding Nemo is that it is under water. The watery realm has perhaps always been an important site for imaginative fiction read by children. Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Henry Williamson’s great animal sagas, Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon, spring immediately to mind as examples. Disney, moreover, had made intermittent forays into the underwater realm, within some of its early nature documentaries, in the animated features The Sword in the Stone and The Little Mermaid, and in live action movies such as Splash, for instance. But no animator before Pixar had, to my knowledge, invested the underwater world with such loving and precise attention to detail as can be found in nearly every frame of Finding Nemo. The film is, as many reviewers acknowledged, both extraordinarily beautiful and realistic in the impression it creates of a range of different tropical ocean environments. David Edelstein’s excitement at the film’s ‘sheer eye-popping beauty’ was also characteristic of other reviewers’ responses, if couched in a somewhat more hyperbolic, colloquial style. ‘Pixar does fish like nobody does fish’ he extolled in a review (2003). The film’s fish protagonists also broke new ground as figures with which children were invited to identify. Not obviously cute or cuddly, and with a leading role in the narrative rather than being presented as human side-kicks, the fish present a challenge for the filmmakers in extending the range of animal forms with which viewers can be affiliated.
The ocean environment that the fish inhabit suggests connections to Braudy’s idea that the fluidity of the watery medium may express values of nature that are ordinarily repressed (1998: 291). But what is immediately striking about the film is the more obvious commitment to representing the physical environment that is shown, through the care taken over nearly every realistic detail. All leading members of the production team took scuba diving lessons so that they could experience the terrain of the coral reef directly for themselves. The natural history of the marine environments portrayed was extensively researched through both museums and books. A professor of animal physiology was brought in to advise on the precise movement of fish; the director/writer, Andrew Stanton, was particularly fascinated by the way fishes’ bodies are semi-translucent and the models on which animators based their simulations carefully incorporated this quality. The multidimensional quality of constantly shifting light patterns in the marine environment more generally was so carefully modelled in a succession of early simulations, indeed, that the images became virtually indistinguishable from documentary footage within films such as The Blue Planet. The overall texture of the image had to be subtly adjusted so that it would not impede the creation of an animation-style aesthetic, which requires that some distance from reality be established to exploit the expressive freedom of the medium fully. As Stanton put it, the world depicted had become too real, ‘we want you to believe that it exists but we want you also to believe that you are in a make-believe world’ (Disney DVD, 2004). No Disney-sponsored film since Bambi had invested so much effort in creating the impression of surface realism within a natural environment.
But what is the ultimate effect of this surface realism and why is it needed in a film where, superficially at least, the animals’ concerns and motivations appear almost as exclusively human as those portrayed in The Lion King? To make a start in addressing these questions, we need to explore more fully how the film’s story is realized within the animated medium. The plot of Finding Nemo concerns the search of a clownfish, called Marlin, for his son Nemo. Nemo is captured by a scuba diving dentist from Sydney early on in the film and then held in a marine aquarium that is displayed in the dentist’s surgery. Marlin has earlier been widowed when a barracuda attacks his family just outside his anemone home on the edge of a coral reef, devouring not only his wife but also 399 of their 400 eggs, that are about to hatch. Nemo thus becomes, in a very special sense, Marlin’s only son, invested with a double weight of paternal attachment that springs from traumatic loss. The story, as Philip French has remarked, is loosely based on John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers, though the scenes in which the small fish are attacked, first by a barracuda and then by a hilariously scary Great White Shark called Bruce, could also be seen as a homage to the more recent horror/thriller classics Jaws and The Shining (French, 2003). As in Ford’s The Searchers, the hero’s long journey to retrieve an offspring whose violent capture has torn his family apart is shaped by tensions in the relationship with a ‘buddy’ figure who travels alongside. In place of Jeffrey Hunter however, Finding Nemo has a blue tang fish called Dory, who suffers from chronic memory loss and is played with immaculate comic timing by Ellen DeGeneres. Albert Brooks’s neurotically anxious Marlin is likewise more Woody Allen than John Wayne, but the narrative has its own inner strength and is played out with great wit and style throughout.
There is little in the plot résumé presented thus far to suggest any underlying concern with animal behaviour and interests that might be enhanced by the film’s impressively realistic depiction of movement and undersea environment. But, although neither the overwhelmingly human psychology of the talking fish nor the skilful integration of references to the classic repertoire of Hollywood films justifies this realism, the film does display an extraordinary range of knowledge of the underwater world it depicts. It is this knowledge, embedded in a variety of forms, that connects with the surface realism and makes Finding Nemo such a rich viewing experience at a number of different levels.
The theme of knowledge, indeed, becomes overt from an early stage. The environment of the reef is reviewed initially from a fish-eyed perspective that is thoroughly annexed to the anxieties of middle-class suburbia, as Marlin extols the virtues of their new home to his wife in terms of the space, neighbourhood and quality of amenities that it offers. But in the aftermath of the traumatic attack that ruptures this suburban idyll, the focus moves on swiftly to the issue of Nemo’s schooling. This too installs a human frame of reference, of course – the idea of ‘schooling’ is at best a metaphor for the adaptive modes of behaviour learned by animals. But the education theme allows a wealth of largely scientific discourses about the natural environment to circulate around the realistic visual imagery of the reef, anchoring this imagery within a domain of ‘objective’ knowledge that is playfully and half-jokingly rehearsed. The doyen of this domain of scientific knowledge is Nemo’s new teacher, a stingray whose curvetting flight around the underwater world is matched by the streams of instruction and tutelage that issue from him continually, swirling in quick-fire verbal eddies around the young fish.
The form in which this knowledge is offered to the young audience – both viewers and fish – is distinctive. The scientific categories that are proposed for understanding the nature of the reef environment are often abstruse and specialized. Moreover the speed at which these new terms of reference are delivered makes it impossible to grasp more than a surface impression of their significance. It is often difficult enough to distinguish key terms, let alone to cognitively assimilate them. Yet the terms are meaningful. When Mr Ray first swings into view, he is intoning a list of the different kinds of spaces into which the sea environment is scientifically divided. Exuding enthusiasm, he chants:
Let’s name the zones of the open sea.
There’s epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathyal, abyssalpelagic;
All the rest are too deep for you and me to see.
The divisions between these zones are not pure abstractions, for the reef fish look out on what, in more colloquial language, is described as the ‘drop-off zone’, where the ocean shelves steeply to its deeper levels. Crossing into this deeper, more open zone is perceived as dangerous and much of the drama in the film relates to choices that must be made in moving from one distinctively defined area in the ocean to another. But there is a further aspect of the way this knowledge is presented here that is equally significant. Through some near miracle of elocution Bob Peterson, who voices the Mr Ray character, manages to deliver his convoluted inventory of different zones with all the sing-song, rhythmic simplicity of a nursery rhyme. As this extraordinary, piscine pedagogue later extols ‘Knowledge exploring is oh so lyrical, when you think thoughts that are empirical’: Mr Ray, it seems, would have his rationalist, scientific categories embodied within the rhapsodies of the poets. The verse quality may be more Sesame Street than Keats, but the lines suggest, in a comic mode, that analytic understanding is wholly commensurate with the sense of beauty and wonder that the ‘lyrical’ encapsulates.
Linking the scientific urge towards categorization with the realm of sensuous feeling is not only important because it connects with innovative kinds of pedagogy that children’s television has been particularly adept at developing. For the rift between the forms of cognitive abstraction that characterize empirical understanding and more direct modes of apprehending sensuous reality – that have often been seen as less estranged – runs deep within modern culture. This rift has been of central concern to writers as varied as William Blake, D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Lawrence, in particular, returns to this theme repeatedly, at times in forms that would seem relevant to the modes of presentation offered in Finding Nemo. In his early novella The Trespasser, for instance, he explores, through his female protagonist Helen Corke, a mode of being in the world that is directly antithetical to Mr Ray’s implied philosophy of learning through abstract categorization:
She refused to learn the names of the stars, or of the constellations, as of the wayside plants: “Why should I want to label them”, she would say. “I want to look at them not hide them under a name.” So she laughed when he asked her to find a Vega or an Actura. (1981: 99)
Lawrence’s novella appears critical of the Helen Corke character at times and does not wholly endorse the attitude expressed here. But the conflict between sensuous apprehension and forms of knowledge that are more cerebral and disassociated was an issue that became increasingly pressing in Lawrence’s later work. It informs, for instance, a debate about children’s education in Women in Love, where the ideas argued over are loaded with the most fraught and intense undercurrents of personal emotion. Here it is the emotionally complex figure of Hermione who is used to articulate an extreme viewpoint, vigorously contested by her lover, Rupert Birkin:
“Are not young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?”
“Not because they have too much mind but too little,” he said brutally.
“Are you sure?” she cried. “It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.”
“Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,” he cried.
But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic interrogation.
“When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?” she asked pathetically. “If I know about the flower don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quantity of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.” (1993: 37)
The absolutist denial of any value for knowledge that Hermione is pressured into articulating here is extreme. But it is not wholly distinct from John Berger’s view of knowledge as a form of power that alienates us from the realm of being that animals and all other life forms inhabit. This is part of what Hermione means by being ‘burdened to death by consciousness’ and, indeed, the whole of Women in Love can be read as a failed quest for a mode of being that restores an instinctual wholeness – often in radically disturbing forms – to the fractured experience of modernity.
Within Finding Nemo, on the other hand, scientific understanding and sensuous apprehension of the world appear to rub shoulders without many obvious signs of friction; the fracture lines between them become the site of playful contrasts in point of view, rather than displaying any more fundamental disjunction. Hence Mr Ray’s scientifically precise taxonomy of the zones of the sea is not insisted upon as a higher form of knowledge, but left dangling as a kind of background jingle that simply coexists with the looser nomenclature of the ‘drop-off zone’ and with the vivid sense perceptions that shape the drama of ordinary experience. The film often plays with perspectives on animal behaviour derived from empirical science, turning them around with the imaginative freedom that the fantasy mode allows, only to reinstate them later. Thus a trio of sharks is reconstructed as a therapeutic support group, dedicated to overcoming the animals’ primal, compulsive instinct to eat other fish. The heady idealism of this self imposed, anthropomorphic restraint collapses when the sharks get a sniff of blood and the full force of their natural drives is reasserted. Likewise, when Marlin and Dory identify a shape in the murky distance as a huge whale, Dory uses scientific knowledge to reassure Marlin as to their safety. Unlike the shark, this type of whale feeds only on tiny krill rather than fish. Unfortunately this objectively accurate piece of information overlooks the mechanism whereby krill are absorbed into the whale’s body and the fish find themselves stuck in the whale’s cavernous maw notwithstanding. In this instance, the fear, driven by direct sense impression of the enormous disparity in size, serves as a more reliable guide for behaviour than scientific knowledge that is partial. It is only the fantasy of cross-species communication in whale language that eventually enables the small fish to be restored to safety. Such playful integration of scientifically accurate perspectives within the overarching flow of fantasy occurs throughout Finding Nemo. My point here is not to suggest that, as in Lawrence’s fiction, this play constitutes an critique of scientific modes of apprehending the world that are construed as potentially limiting. Instead, the multiplicity of viewpoints is tolerated in Finding Nemo, indeed serves as a positive base for the film’s creative energies.
The film’s watery setting provides this broad tolerance of disparate, potentially conflicting discourses with an apt medium of expression. The ease of movement between conflicting ideas that is such a hallmark of the film’s intellectual quality might be construed as analogous, in its essential fluidity, to water. And this fluidity, indeed, informs the narrative structure of Finding Nemo at a number of levels. Gaston Bachelard has argued that imaginative work that is focused within the medium of water is highly distinctive. He writes that:
… the material imagination of water is a special type of imagination. … Water is also a type of destiny that is no longer simply the vain destiny of fleeting images and a never ending dream but an essential destiny that endlessly changes the substance of the being. … One cannot bathe twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water. Water is truly the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away. (1983: 6)
The elemental flux that Bachelard describes here provides an insight into a fundamental principle of narrative development within Finding Nemo. For, in the state of anxiety over the loss of his son that both defines and drives him, the main character, Marlin, is represented emotionally as precisely ‘dying every minute’. As Bachelard later puts it, ‘for the materialising imagination, death associated with water is more dreamlike than death associated with earth: the pain of water is infinite’ (ibid.: 6).
The tone of Bachelard’s remarks may appear at first too serious to match with the lightness of comic touch that pervades Finding Nemo. But, in fact, this comedy has a persistently darker edge. Marlin’s progress towards rescuing his son is marked by a series of near death experiences, including the archetypal Jonah-like episode of being swallowed by a whale. And the cumulative effect of these experiences is indeed to enact subtle changes in the substance of the central protagonist’s being. These changes take place within two main dimensions. They bring out the character’s capacity for heroism, a capacity that cross-fertilizes imaginatively with the efforts of other sea creatures to rescue Nemo; and they loosen the hold of Marlin’s anxiety driven protectiveness, allowing a more receptive, flexible set of characteristics, that can adapt to new environments, to be developed. Perhaps the most palpable evidence of imagery embodying such changes in states of being is provided by the journey the animals undertake along the East Australian Current. This natural phenomenon is itself an exemplar of the transformative energy associated with flow, of course. In this instance, the flow not only assists the turtles, who use the current as a kind of natural freeway in their migration from breeding grounds, but also brings Marlin and Dory closer to their goal of finding Nemo. ‘Hey, that was fun!’ exclaims Marlin, as he eventually breaks clear of the current and the migrating stream of turtles accelerated through the ocean in its sway. It is the first time Marlin has expressed pleasure at the adventurous aspects of change with which his journey has engaged him and the moment signals his gradual release from the defensive burden of fear he has carried since the film’s opening.
These psychological features of narrative development are thoroughly human in orientation, but they are rooted in the material qualities of the marine environment that the fish – and film – inhabit. One might argue, moreover, that it is precisely the distinctive qualities of this watery realm that facilitate the film’s drawing what Braudy calls ‘the repressed values of nature’ into its underlying message. Andrew Stanton has spoken of an unexceptional personal experience that provided him with part of the rationale for his script. Walking along a pavement with his son one day, he became aware that most of his interactions with the child were directed towards preventing the possibility of his son’s encountering danger from the passing traffic (Disney DVD 2004). So absorbed was he in these protective responsibilities that he felt he had no time to respond in more natural, creative or playful ways. This common realization became the basis for a plot in which the fish hero learns, eventually, to let go of his protective anxieties and allow his son to live. But the range of implications of this lesson becomes extended in the film to reach far wider than personal values affecting childcare and families. What is at stake here, ultimately, is the whole ethos that drives a society that increasingly attempts to eliminate risk in all possible contexts. The film draws implicitly on a distinctive embodiment of core ‘values of nature’ – fluidity, the acceptance of death and danger as inherent within growth – to contest a set of social assumptions that, while apparently benign in intention, have begun to undermine a fundamental sense of freedom in western society.
As in many other narratives of wild nature, this precarious sense of freedom – together with the anxieties associated with its potential loss – is projected onto images of the natural world. Finding Nemo is remarkable, however, in developing a parallel narrative to its wild ocean odyssey, within the confines of a marine aquarium. Here too the central issue is the desire for freedom, as the fish seek a means to escape. But whereas the natural environment of the ocean is staged largely as a forum within which key social values can be contested and explored, the aquarium becomes a space where the human craving for carefully regulated proximity to animals is examined in a fresh ways within a contemporary urban setting. The fish-eyed view from inside the glass-boxed mini-ocean is a rich source of comic gags and one-liners. The aquarium inmates’ interest in the precise details of dental procedures taking place on the other side of the room from them is worked up as a particularly effective running joke; the animals’ command of specialist canine terminology is both witty and adds another element to the quasi-scientific discourses that, as we noted earlier, curl so effortlessly around the action of this movie.
But the deeper significance of the aquarium based plot lies in the way it configures human interactions with nature, rather than animal commentaries on humans. Some strands of this interaction appear to draw on motifs that have long histories within children’s literature. The brattish girl, who anticipates being given Nemo as her own pet with expressions of sadistic glee, comes from a line of animal tormenting figures within narratives for children dating back to the eighteenth century. Her most recent forebear is the redoubtable young toy torturer from Pixar’s earlier comic masterpiece, Toy Story. The scenario of the wild animal’s escape from human captivity is likewise very familiar within recent narratives for children, from the Orca series to DreamWorks’ Spirit. But Finding Nemo does not simply endorse the creatures’ right to freedom in a wild natural environment, contrasted with their present conditions in captivity. To begin with, the aquarium tank, though constraining in terms of space, has its own kind of slightly garish beauty, so that it represents a rather attractive environment, at least from the perspective of the human viewer. One reviewer, indeed, was led to ponder whether the film, rather than increasing respect for fish in the wild, might actually ‘fuel an upsurge of interest in salt water aquariums’ amongst young, would-be pet owners (Berardinelli, 2003). Another reviewer suggested that the dreamlike visual quality of the whole film evoked both ‘the reverie of scuba diving’ and the ‘hypnotic beauty’ of ‘fish in an aquarium’ (Ebert, 2003). Rather than simply endorsing the value of a nature independent of human interests, in other words, the appeal of Finding Nemo derives from its links to the experience of water sports within the tourist and leisure industries, as well as giving a not wholly negative spin to commerce in fish as pets. The latter dimension acquires a more favourable slant through the film’s representing the majority of the aquarium animals as having been bred in captivity. Thus, while it is true that there are satirical thrusts at the pet owning culture of urban modernity – particularly as expressed through the rather chilling, robotic efficiency of the aquarium filtration system and the gloating nastiness of Nemo’s prospective child owner – the fish tank is in many ways set up appealingly for viewers. Visually, it stands as much in a complementary relationship to the wild environment of the ocean as it does in a contrastive one.
Finding Nemo as a whole, indeed, does not attempt to establish a picture of a pristine natural world, free from all negative signs of human intervention, as many earlier animations involving wild nature had sought to do. The underwater world around the reef is plied by scuba divers who capture fish, while the wider reaches of the ocean floor reveal the vast hull of a sunken ship surrounded, as though this were a macabre and still lethal memorial celebrating war, by mines that float at the end of their weed-festooned chains, with all the sardonic gaiety of party balloons. Closer to mainland Australia, Nemo’s escape route from the dentist’s surgery into Sydney harbour takes us through the drainage system that pours human waste products daily into the ocean. The awareness this creates of the continual flow connecting human cities to wild nature is, unwittingly, made more vivid by the director’s decision to cut a scene which detailed episodes showing how Nemo slips through the machinery of Sidney’s waste water filtration system. In the event, Nemo appears to emerge into the bay area from a pipe bearing raw sewage. Once in the ocean, the full joy of Nemo’s reuniting with his father is delayed once more, by a last near catastrophe that focuses dramatic attention on the ruthless efficiency of the modern fishing industry. There is enough source material here to fill several textbooks on the effects of human interaction on the ecology of the marine environment. Although most of the images depicting such interactions in the film have a dark edge to them however, the emotional force behind these images is deflected from ever becoming a full-blown critique of modern environmental practices that may be leading to disaster. The incidents, though compelling in themselves, are isolated from each other in discrete episodes, while the images of the vast ocean as a whole retain a limpid and mysterious purity. The inferences that a viewer may draw from this multilayered plot thus remain relatively open and it is left to additional material, included on the DVD of Finding Nemo that was released in 2004, to make potential connections to environmental issues more explicit. Within the more sober context of a short documentary on the world’s fast disappearing coral reefs, Jacques Cousteau makes an impassioned plea for concerted action to counteract the effects of global warming. Even here though, the authoritative status of Cousteau’s brief jeremiad is undercut by a stream of garbled, jokey interruptions, issuing almost continually from the seemingly irrepressible images of animated fish that are superimposed on the documentary footage of the reef. Even within its ancillary products it seems, Finding Nemo is committed to a thoroughly post-modern aesthetic.
The overall effect of Finding Nemo, in terms of the images of nature it deploys, is thus complex. The film eschews – perhaps wisely – engaging viewers emotionally by using what Greg Garrard has called the ‘rhetorical strategies’ of ‘apocalyptic narrative’. These strategies, Garrard suggests, have arguably ‘provided the green movement with some of its most striking successes’ (2004: 85). The images that Finding Nemo offers, by contrast, are more localized in effect and multivalent in terms of their implied meaning. In this respect, the film also differs markedly from Bambi, where the closing episode of the forest fire is precisely apocalyptic in its overtones. Finding Nemo refuses such totalizing gestures however, incorporating different strands of human interaction with wild nature in a more piecemeal fashion. Although the artistic flair with which this is done makes for a quite exceptional movie, the film does not have the direct emotional impact of Bambi. It would be unimaginable to claim that viewing Bambi might encourage hunting interests in its viewers, in the same way that some commentators have suggested Finding Nemo could stimulate desire for aquarium ownership and the capture of marine fish. The view of wild nature that emerges so powerfully in Bambi is of a realm that needs protecting from human depredation. It is not surprising that the film has been seen as a source of inspiration for young viewers who would later become passionately involved in conservation work and environmental politics. Finding Nemo, by contrast, is more dispassionate. Its images of the natural world characteristically incorporate unfeeling humans or are edged with menace. And the darker nuances of such scenes undoubtedly connect with contemporary anxieties and environmental guilt. But the various forms of human interaction with this strange underwater world appear, ultimately, to be accepted as much as established fact as is the presence of terrifying natural predators there. The ocean in Finding Nemo is represented as a source of wonder and excitement; but the film offers an imaginative stimulus for different modes of understanding the strange otherness of this watery zone of nature, rather than a sustained, impassioned plea to protect it. Knowing, light on its fins and aware of strands of contradiction inherent within our complex feelings towards the natural world, Finding Nemo is a fable for our time.