‘Nonetheless, the power of language remains, first and foremost, a way of singing oneself into contact with others and with the cosmos … Whether sounded on the tongue … or shimmering on the screen, language’s primary gift is not to re-present the world around us but to call ourselves into the vital presence of that world – and into deep and attentive presence with one another.’
David Abram, Becoming Animal
In this book I have argued for an ecologically grounded view of Disney animated films that many people may find contentious, and some surprising. My central proposition is that there exists, within the whole oeuvre of Disney and Disney-Pixar animated features, a rich tradition of films that are engaged with the question of how we relate to and understand the natural world of which we are ourselves a part. Implicit within this proposition is the view that we have been insufficiently aware of the strengths of this tradition hitherto, and that it should be seen as an emotional and aesthetic resource that may help draw the young towards the kinds of connection, understanding and debate that are vital if we are to come through our current environmental crisis and to learn from it. I realize that many people who have been deeply involved in the cultural politics of environmentalism will see this view as insufficiently critical and will want to argue against it, some vehemently. As adults, we have been used for some time now, particularly in academic circles, to seeing Disney as the enemy of progressive forces and perhaps the chief promulgator of a gaudy, synthetic and sentimental view of the world that we characterize pejoratively as ‘Disneyfication’. How could the products of this corporation possibly help move audiences towards a more authentic, respectful and engaged relationship with nature?
And yet, as I have tried to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, there exists a core group of films within the Disney canon that are clearly focused on the issues, questions and concerns that have exercised philosophers, environmentalists and activists over succeeding generations, since Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was first released. Of course these issues and concerns are dramatized in a very different mode from that adopted within environmental writing, where the form of engagement offered is generally earnest, deeply knowledgeable and sometimes lyrical. Disney films, by contrast, are comic, playful and sentimental in unashamedly populist ways. But the best of the films are also subtle and exuberant and exhibit their own kind of lyricism at key moments. Like the fairy tales on which so many of the early films were based, they are also optimistic – a double-edged quality in this context perhaps, since their detractors see this optimism as a false commercial attribute that sugars over the audience’s perception of more troubling difficulties in the issues that are presented. I have argued here that troubling issues maintain a more active, if sometimes covert, presence in the best films of this tradition than is often recognized, however, perhaps similarly to the way good comedy, more generally, often allows darker, disturbing shadows to circulate beneath the gaiety of its surface.
The most substantial part of my argument though rests on what I hope is a careful discrimination of the quality – as well as the qualities – of the films involved. If one were to sit down and watch in a sequence the films that I take to be the cornerstone of this mini-tradition – Snow White, Bambi, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo and WALL•E – one would, I think, be struck by the extraordinary consistency with which ethical and emotional questions about how humans should relate to animals and the environment come up. One would also be struck by the imaginative variety and artistic quality of many of the moving image sequences through which the sensuous world is evoked. These films, I would argue, constitute a unique mini-tradition, a subset, whose achieved quality within different genres offers a touchstone for assessing possible influence, alternative directions and differences in other animated films.
Looking towards the future rather than the past, I should like to conclude now with a brief overview of some significant developments within animation generally since the millennium that relate to the way the environment is staged and understood. Let us begin with the fairy tale, where there has been a renewal of creative interest from Disney in the last few years with the release of two major animated features, The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Tangled (2010).
What distinguishes Disney’s (in some ways quite surprising) return to the classic form of the fairy tale nearly 20 years after Beauty and the Beast is perhaps less a response to a major shift in cultural perceptions of nature than competition from other major animation companies in the United States. The remarkable success of DreamWorks’ Shrek series moved the animated adaptation of the fairy tale forms decisively in a new direction, and one that was in many ways antithetical to core Disney values of innocence, enchantment and optimism. Like many post-modern narratives, Shrek manages to keep its feet in two camps at the same time. The storyline clearly embraces the dissonant energies of disenchantment, ironic detachment and the appeal of the grotesque, reconfiguring the rival claims of romance and sentiment in the process. The aesthetic mode Shrek developed was the very antithesis of Snow White (indeed imagery reflecting Disney’s Snow White is consigned to the function of toilet paper even before the opening credits have started to roll). In response, Disney’s fairy tales of the new millennium may be seen as reclaiming the values of its own tradition, whilst also building in some elements of Shrek’s smart, deconstructive style (Crandall, 2004) – a kind of counter-reformation in the cultural sphere of children’s animation.
The attitude towards the natural world that is dramatized in Shrek is stridently anti-pastoral, as well as anti-romantic. The slime-filled swamp is its heartland, rather than the woods and open fields. Indeed, when the characters venture forth along more conventional sylvan paths they appear as predisposed towards pumping frogs full of air to bursting point as they are towards contemplating the beauty of the firmament at night. The connection to nature is made to twist and turn within Shrek, always alert to the comic energies embodied in substituting grotesque or degraded conceits for more traditional forms of harmonious affiliation to human identity. The mordantly ironic handling of Snow White’s sentimental pastoral, in particular, positions the viewer in a mode of detached ambivalence towards nature, with Shrek’s own penchant for the slimy pleasures of his abject swamp domain inviting appreciation through the comic reversal of normative values, rather than through fuller identification.
Interestingly, Disney’s first riposte to Shrek, The Princess and the Frog, also uses the swamp as a primary setting and, like Shrek, turns on a love story in which the romantic protagonists are turned into grotesque, non-human forms. Also as in Shrek, the romantic couple learn to love and accept each other in their grotesque other forms as frogs (although The Princess and the Frog is less radical in eventually restoring the frog pair’s humanity). As in Disney’s earlier Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid films, however, the storyline shows a strong interest in the central characters’ affiliation to animals and the natural world that is largely absent in Shrek. The frog/humans learn from their journey through the swamp, which is represented more in terms of its inherent vitality and natural beauty than as an abject region. In this sense the film suggests continuity with the earlier Disney fairy tales, though updated, both in terms of tone and in the positive presentation of African-American racial identity. This view is borne out by the film’s return to the traditional Disney form of the musical, and by the decision to employ Ron Clements and John Musker (who had worked on The Little Mermaid) as directors and co-writers. Despite some differences in perspective, there is a strong sense of a continuing tradition.
Disney’s next fairy tale, Tangled (2010), an adaptation of the tale of Rapunzel, is less richly engaged with themes and images of wild nature. However, it does offer one or two distinctive, new perspectives. Rapunzel’s escape from the tower in which she has had to live for the whole of her childhood and adolescence, for instance, is conceived in a spirit of intoxicating joy at the prospect of reconnecting to the sensuous world of grass, trees, wind and wild animals. In a different reworking of the fairy tale material, one could see this image offering thoughtful, or even critical, perspectives on the conditions of modern childhood, where free play in the outside world has become increasingly curtailed and circumscribed (Louv, 2005). Within Tangled, this never really becomes part of the core agenda that the film is exploring, but it is interesting that Rapunzel should have been conceived as one of the most physical of all Disney’s heroines. She not only embraces the earth with exhilaration on her escape from the tower, but also charms and dominates a powerful stallion in the manner of Crocodile Dundee, and moves with a vitality and confidence rivalled only by Pocahontas from earlier Disney movies. Tangled and The Princess and the Frog indicate, in different ways, that the connection between traditional fairy tales and nature is still present in the modern era. The vitality of this connection is perhaps even more in evidence in significant animated films outside the Disney tradition, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s most recent foray into the fairy tale mode, Ponyo (2008), and Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou (1998), a particularly compelling and original adaptation of a West African oral tale.
Although it is perhaps rash to make generalizations without the benefit of full historical hindsight, the imaginative space occupied by the North American wilderness seems to have offered little scope for significant development by animators in the Disney tradition over the past decade or so. Only Brother Bear has fully used the North American wilderness as a scenario, and the mediocre artistic quality of this film limits the degree to which it can engage with the issues we have been exploring here with any real depth. Other recent Disney animations with settings in rural America – Chicken Little (2005) and Home on the Range (2004) for instance – have been largely genre movies in which the anthropomorphized animals play essentially human roles with little or no connection to environmental ideas or sensibilities. There has been rather more interest recently, though, in playing with scenarios in which aspects of wild nature are situated within urban settings in North America. Some of these films explore the relationship between wild energies and urban space to some extent, a theme which has also exercised thinking within a significant strand of recent environmental writing. Indeed, the increasing incursion of wild animals into urban environments and animals’ adaptation to the opportunities afforded by cities more generally has been widely documented in many parts of the globe (Louv, 2005: 245–70). Seen from this perspective, the central theme of Pixar’s Ratatouille (2008) may be conceived as the renewal of creativity (in this case creativity in cooking in a famous Parisian restaurant) through the absorption of neglected or suppressed wilder imaginative energies associated with animals. This may be a slightly strained, allegorical reading of the role played by heavily anthropomorphized rats in the film, but the imagery of human and animal realms interacting with each other in forms that challenge the ossified rigidity of a dominant, official regime has some parallels with the subversive function of the mice in Cinderella (1950). In Ratatouille this theme is transferred to a resolutely metropolitan, now European, setting. Other recent American animations from non-Disney studios have explored the interface between city environments and wild animal nature in more sustained ways. DreamWorks’ The Bee Movie (2007), for instance, uses the widely rehearsed fear of a complete collapse in the world bee population to drive an – at times rather flimsy – plot about a bee that becomes integrated into human society in New York. Although not wholly successful, the film includes some good gags based on parallels and differences between human and bee societies. The film also has an educative potential for young viewers, promoting more general awareness of possible environmental crisis and of our interdependence with other bio-communities. Over the Hedge (2006) takes as its founding premise wild animals’ dependence on humans as a source of food in urban environments. It is not nearly as searching a film as the playful but incisive Japanese animation Pom Poko (1994), however, in its exploration of the implications of such dependence. One or two other recent films, DreamWorks’ Madagascar (2005) and the more derivative The Wild (2006), which was distributed by Disney, have developed plotlines around the escape of wild animals in city zoos. These have been used both to showcase other wildlife that has adapted to urban environments (such as alligators in New York sewers) and to develop comic scenarios around what happens when caged animals are returned to natural environments – in these instances within Africa. This is an increasingly significant issue for conservationists as attempts are made to reintroduce extinct species to areas where they have died out or to enhance the stock of endangered animals in the wild. It will be interesting to see to what extent the imaginative scope for developing such themes is taken up in the future. The evidence at the moment would seem to be that these themes are present within contemporary animated features, but are not usually invested with sufficient imaginative force or specificity to connect in any substantial way with analogous issues in the real world.
In part, this detachment may be due to the increasing erosion of a distinctive sense of place or localized affiliation within contemporary globalized societies. Perhaps related to this tendency, it is remarkable how many recent animated films move their animal protagonists between radically different locales, often abandoning any shred of verisimilitude in the process. In Happy Feet (2006), for instance, the penguin hero Mumble sets off on a quest to discover the source of the environmental degradation affecting the survival prospects of his fellow penguins in the Antarctic and ends up in the middle of the Pacific, whence he is taken to a California zoo. In the gently environmentally attuned Belgian animation A Turtle’s Tale (2011), the tropical marine protagonists make an even more unlikely journey in the reverse direction, nearly dying when they reach the frozen seas of the Antarctic. The caged New York animals in Madagascar (2005) cross the Atlantic to reach the titular African island (which David Attenborough’s nature documentaries have done much to lodge in the popular imagination), while the zoo animals in The Wild (2006) journey to another African landscape, one that is threatened by a volcanic eruption. Species’ relationship to locale, the long-term product of Darwinian evolution and adaptation to particular ecological niches, is being reconfigured as protean, provisional, subject to transplantation across the vast reaches of oceans that separate continents. Nature, viewed from the perspective of the fantastical licence of animation, appears everywhere to be on the move, displaced in direct proportion to the global contraction of land that might still be characterized as wild. One might, indeed, legitimately conceive of WALL•E as exemplifying an even more hyperbolic version of this recent tendency, with life forms moving between hostile environments across space, rather than between continents.
It may be possible to detect some significant changes also in the degree to which the burden of environmental concerns has become more overt in many instances within recent animation, even in settings that were previously playgrounds for exploring archetypal fantasies. WALL•E is clearly much more powerfully and openly engaged with environmental ethics than the slightly earlier Finding Nemo. Outside the Disney canon, Happy Feet and The Bee Movie both offer fables within which environmental disasters are averted through humans and animals learning to co-operate. There is also an overt, didactic message in A Turtle’s Tale, which contains images relating to human activities in the ocean environment that are similar to those found in Finding Nemo, but show destructive effects much more clearly. Though varied in artistic quality, such films appear to have taken up the environmental legacy of Fredric Jameson’s imaginative view of history as ‘that which hurts’ as well as ‘that which inspires’ (quoted in Stam, 2000: 19).
Alongside this tendency towards more overt environmental didacticism, there also appears to have been creative interest in featuring the oceans (as opposed to tropical rain forests and savannahs of earlier films) more prominently as domains for animal fantasy narratives. This is true both of the tropical oceans that are the primary setting for Finding Nemo, The Reef (2006), Shark Tale (2004) and A Turtle’s Tale and of the partially frozen Antarctic seas in Happy Feet. The frequency of recent animators’ fascination with such locales may be in part because the oceans and the polar regions have begun to feature so greatly in our environmental imaginations: they are regularly invoked in the news and within documentaries as offering early, dramatic indications of the effects of climate change. But the oceans are also a potent symbol of change, strange transformations, and rebirth generally, as Shakespeare reminds us so richly in The Tempest. The sea’s transformative power, its role in the genesis of life, and its function as the great reservoir through which the cycles of nature are enacted, serve as the imaginative spur for the mythological handling of the Gaia-like guardian spirit of ecological balance in Hayao Miyazaki’s recent Ponyo (2008). Indeed, there are elements of these richly symbolic functions of the sea in play even within Disney’s own earlier version of The Little Mermaid fairy tale.
Finally the more distanced setting of the prehistoric past seems to have generated imaginative energy more frequently recently, as the Ice Age films, Brother Bear and Dinosaur bear witness. Even though Brother Bear does not achieve the artistic quality of The Jungle Book, its ethical stance, urging greater humility within humans and embracing a regenerative kinship of the most extreme kind with animals, resonates strongly with contemporary animal rights philosophies and aspects of post-humanism. Pixar’s recent film Up (2009) also explores animal rights and human responsibilities in relation to prehistoric creatures that have survived in a strangely isolated habitat, locked away from human interaction until rediscovered by rival explorers. Dinosaur, whose primary setting is within tropical forests at the end of the Mesozoic era, features a group of animals attempting to survive the sudden onset of environmental catastrophe on a slightly diminished scale to that which wiped out the dinosaurs in historical reality. The central question driving the plot forwards – how may a group survive the most intensive environmental threat imaginable? – has implicit parallels to our own age. In the film’s fantasy resolution, the dinosaurs curb their aggressive individualism and survive the ecological disaster by learning to co-operate with each other. The underlying urge to shape the narrative around a set of contemporary ethical concerns and environmental anxieties is clear. Ice Age 2 (2006) also features a journey by a group of animals attempting to survive the effects of sudden environmental change, in this case the melting of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. The distant past remains a place where animators can give full rein to archetypal fantasies, but one where analogies with the environmental vulnerabilities we are experiencing in our own age appear to exert increasing ethical pressure.
The engagement of key Disney films with environmental concerns at a thematic level is very clear, when the films are examined together in the ways I have explored in this book. A central question, perhaps, remains, though, about the extent to which these films – or at least the best of them – can also be seen, as David Abram puts it rather grandly, as ‘a way of singing oneself into contact with others and with the cosmos’ (2010: 11). Disney has generally been credited with moving animation closer to realistic modes of configuring the world, centring the action on character-based, comic melodrama that retains much of the affective power of live action films. The technical expertise and artistry expended on realistic dimensions of Disney animated films is important in the context of environmental awareness, as realism can give us the illusion of feeling closer to the world as it is, and thereby deepen our ethical concern for it. But animation only ever approximates to our perception of the real world: it creatively – and often fantastically – refashions the world, rather than re-presenting it directly. Whether Disney films’ refashioning is really capable of singing us ‘into the vital presence of that world’ (ibid.) with the sensuous, imaginative force that Abram argues is necessary for us to reground ourselves ethically and ecologically, is a judgement I must leave readers to determine for themselves. My own view is that this depends as much on the culture, experience and sensitivities that we bring to the experience of watching the films as it does on the qualities of the films themselves. No one would pretend that watching Disney films is going to compensate for what Richard Louv (2005) has characterized as the ‘nature-deficit disorder’ that looms so large within modern childhood, nor that any form of art is a substitute for the understanding that comes from direct experience. But art can foster our rich imaginative engagement with the world in surprising forms; it can provoke reflection by making us see the world afresh from strange, new or even fantastical angles; and it can bring our daydreams out into a peculiar kind of refracted light, wherein we see and feel things more intensely and pleasurably for a while. In a medium that involves moving image, sound and music, art may even be able to sing us into a distinctive kind of lyric receptiveness. Although it may not (at least in Disney films) conjure the vital presence of the world with the depth and intensity Abram calls for, the most imaginative animation may at least enhance our potential openness to that experience. Perhaps Disney films are ultimately like a kind of weed in the garden of children’s cultural experience. Like many of the gaudy, resilient invader species that exist in nature, they have successfully colonized a significant area within the affective domain of contemporary childhood. Richard Mabey (2010) has argued that we should appreciate the role that weeds play in brightening odd corners of the ground, bringing colour to derelict sites, securing the earth we live on from further erosion, and preparing the way for other life forms. I think perhaps we could learn to appreciate the ecological role played by Disney films in similar vein.