‘Disney’s films are a revolt against partitioning and legislating, against spiritual stagnation and greyness. But the revolt is lyrical. The revolt is a daydream.’
Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney
This book takes a fresh look at Disney animated films, seen from the particular perspective of their engagement with the theme of wild nature. This theme, I shall argue, was of central importance from the moment Disney first ventured fatefully into the form of the animated feature in 1937. Grafted onto the root-stem of fairy tale and linked predominantly to the plotline of maturation within romantic comedy, the theme of wild nature forms the very heartland of Disney’s animated features from their inception in Snow White through to recent films such as Finding Nemo and Brother Bear. Not all of Disney’s animated feature films focus centrally on wild creatures or natural environments, of course. Indeed this provides a useful principle of exclusion, enabling the films considered in detail in this study to be narrowed down to manageable proportions. But the theme is prevalent enough to make a claim for its centrality justifiable and even those films – outside the realm of this study – which feature domesticated animals or humans as their sole protagonists are often concerned with contrasts between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ in their assessments of behaviour. Cruella De Vil is not the only figure in Disney whose characteristic brutality is made to contrast with animals (and animal lovers) who have an affinity with the natural world. In many of the most famous and best loved Disney films, however – such as Snow White, Bambi, The Jungle Book, The Lion King and Finding Nemo – wild nature figures directly and it is with these films that I shall be principally concerned.
It is not only the prevalence of wild nature as a theme within Disney animation that justifies the focus of this study, however. What nature means to us, the forms in which we perceive what we deem to be ‘natural’, the feelings and the ideas that we bring to bear on our relationship with the natural world, have all become of critical importance at the historical juncture we now live in. In studying some of the ways that these issues are embedded within Disney’s films, therefore, I am aware that I have also embarked on a venture that has involved educating and attuning myself in significant new ways. This has been an exciting project for me at a personal level because it has taken me beyond the reach of my previous understanding and left me feeling differently about a range of things I had previously taken for granted. I hope the reader of this book can share in something of that excitement.
Disney films are associated, above anything else, with the realm of feeling. These are films whose stock in trade is emotion, often construed in a negative mode within academic criticism as conservatively sentimental. Again and again, Disney animated features make a play for our feelings; inventing animals with exaggerated features that enhance their cuteness; creating characters out of stereotypes that are finessed by charm and humour; developing stock situations with a twist designed to engage the audience’s feelings with renewed potency. Such deliberate attempts to court and cultivate sentiment are often taken to be signs of the inauthentic in Disney’s aesthetic, a pandering to popular taste that mitigates against developing the art of animation in more probing, thoughtful or challenging forms. The astonishing commercial success of Disney animation over such a long period, the expansion of the Disney Company’s corporate interests into a whole range of enterprises with global reach and the ensuing domination of the Disney brand in the realm of children’s entertainment have encouraged such critical perspectives. But as this framework of critical ideas has begun to constitute a standard response to Disney within academic writing, it may be worth looking again, from a more open point of view, at some of the underlying assumptions, particularly in relation to how we understand the role of sentiment within popular art forms. This is a particularly important issue at our present historical conjuncture because so much of our mainstream political rhetoric on environmental issues in the West is directed towards rationalist goals of ‘sustainability’, designed to accommodate relatively minor changes in outlook and lifestyle to the underlying norms of economic growth and productivity, with technology being viewed as the principal resource that needs to be engaged to stave off global crisis. Yet others argue, with increasing urgency, that what is needed to face our current situation adequately is not simply an investment in new ‘greener’ technologies and small adjustments in our thinking about our patterns of consumption, but rather a whole revolution in sensibility and the value systems that underpin our lives (Bonnett 2004). What needs to change here is the way we feel about the world, the way we understand and relate to the other – non-human as well as human – organisms that share our sphere of existence, and the way we experience our identities as human beings in relation to the complex web of linked organic systems that intersect with our lives. This is not simply an intellectual exercise or an adjustment of attitude; the challenge is to integrate thought and feeling at a more profound level and in new ways.
If this is the real challenge that the environmental agenda of the twenty-first century has put before us, then the question arises as to what role art – which has always had a primary function in helping us both to focus and to integrate thoughts and feelings in relation to the most fundamental challenges of our existence – may play in shaping our awareness. Is it possible that popular art – which tends to simplify problematic issues and to rely on narrative patterns that focus interest on the personalities of the characters and the immediate impact of actions, rather than more reflective or complex modes of response – could have a role beyond the relatively straightforward transmission of social ideologies in affecting our consciousness? If we begin by countenancing this as a possibility, then the enhanced role of sentiment within dramatic narratives such as Disney animation could provide audiences – and especially young audiences – with a cultural arena within which heightened emotions and humour, rather than operating as a barrier to thought and critical engagement, might offer a relatively safe sphere within which crucial issues could be rehearsed and even – in light forms – explored.
Evidence that this could be a fruitful hypothesis to bring to bear on the legacy of Disney animation in particular is provided by the impact of one of the earliest features produced by the company, Bambi (1942). In Chapter 3, which is devoted entirely to an analysis of this film, I argue that Bambi was innovative in realizing the potential of an archetypal plot – the idyllic realm of nature rendered vulnerable by human action – within a particular historical conjuncture. The populist idiom within which Disney developed this theme should not distract us from appreciating how the film engages audiences with key issues that had been developed within the ethos of conservationism, as this is distinctively embodied within North American traditions of thought. The care and artistic sensitivity that Disney animators brought to this project, including choices in the way the environment that the deer live in is represented, heighten the audience’s attentiveness to detail in a way that allows the significance of the animals’ lives to acquire multiple meanings. At one level, the story of a young deer’s growth to adulthood, surviving the emotional impact of the death of its mother at an early age, can be understood straightforwardly as the classic Disney maturation plot, linked to the life cycle of the animal and offered to the reader through a mode of emotional identification that includes rampant anthropomorphizing. However, the realization of this plot, I argue, opens the story out to other meanings and connections. Particularly important in this regard is the way the imagery of Bambi connects with the idea of ‘wilderness’, as this has been developed by writers such as John Muir and Henry Thoreau and through traditions of landscape photography epitomized most fully in the work of Ansel Adams.
I explore these connections in detail in Chapter 3. What needs to be recognized at the outset though, is that the particular form in which the plot of Bambi is realized makes its sentimental strain double edged. On the one hand, the film’s unabashed play for young viewers’ emotions – rendering wild nature as disarmingly cute – may create a barrier, making it more difficult for viewers to understand and relate to a ‘real’ nature that has not been so carefully manicured and stage managed as spectacle. The choreographed interactions between animal ‘friends’ of different species, the wide-eyed enhancement of facial features designed to appeal to human ideals of attractiveness and the elimination of natural predators to create a world of idyllic innocence all combine to produce a sentimental viewpoint that is difficult to reconcile with full respect for the integrity and otherness of the natural world. On the other hand, the emotional identification that these features in part facilitate undoubtedly enables a powerful empathy to be built up between the viewer and an archetypal image of nature as a form to which we are connected and owe allegiance. In this latter sense, the sentimental devices serve a larger aim, as they might do within any other art form with unrealistic conventions that the audience accepts. If the sweeteners can be swallowed without gagging moreover (a difficulty more likely to be experienced by older viewers), other aspects come into play, which temper the saccharine laced aesthetic and attune the viewer more profoundly to significant features of wild nature also displayed in more serious art forms. Again, these aspects are reviewed more fully in Chapter 3, but they include the lavish attention paid to sensuous detail by the animators that imparts a lyrical quality to the film, consonant with the attentive reverence shown towards every feature of the natural environment by Muir, Thoreau and Ansel Adams.
The capacity of the sentiment engendered within Disney animations to point in different directions is further complicated by the way audiences’ sensibilities may be shaped by the historical contingencies of their time. The historical moment at which Bambi was first released, for instance, just after America’s entry into World War II in the aftermath of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, was particularly significant. Bambi was received with rather lukewarm ambivalence and did comparatively poorly at the box office on its initial run. One might speculate that the particular ambience of the peaceful, innocent, natural world evoked in Bambi was an impediment for audiences at this moment in time, when the national sensibility was being orientated to harnessing aggression in response to a larger threat worldwide and to mobilizing for war. It was only during the 1950s, when it was re-released several times, that the film started to hit a nerve of environmental conscience with audiences and became one of the most popular of all Disney’s animated features.
The example of Bambi suggests at least two notions that are of great importance for this study. First, although the plotline may be relatively simple, the artistic choices made in its realization are related to ideas and figurative traditions in more complex ways that can shape viewers’ perceptions and responses, though not necessarily in single minded or stable forms. This multiplicity – and changing nature – of possible responses informs my second point. Henry Giroux has argued that ‘Disney inscribes itself in a commanding way on the lives of children and powerfully shapes the way America’s cultural landscape is imagined’ (2004: 168). This is a strong argument; but the shaping of a ‘cultural landscape’ is an interactive process, rather than the imposition of a singular template, and the interaction that takes place is both between the film and the ideas/images that inform the creative process of its making and between the completed film and successive generations of viewers. One could argue that the ‘cultural landscape’ that was shaped within Bambi at the moment of its completion represented a rather conservative version of key ideas in the environmental philosophy of the time, mapped onto the archetype of a vulnerable, innocent paradise. The seedbed which the film’s images laid down for viewers in the mid- to late 1950s, however, was arguably rather different. Those who saw the film as children in this period were exposed to more radical critiques of environmental practices (widely available from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 onwards) as they came to maturity as young adults. The imagery and emotional power of Bambi clearly connected with these more radical critiques for a significant number of these viewers, who went on to become environmental activists. The emotional power of Bambi can thus operate in different directions, a point that remains in evidence to this day when, as a counterpoint to its radicalizing legacy, the film’s title is often invoked as a derogatory shorthand denoting attitudes of sentimental indulgence towards animal protection.
The degree – and form – in which the emotive power of animated films may be realized is influenced by another factor that is particularly distinctive to the Disney aesthetic and has become a contentious issue as animation finally begins to receive the attention it deserves within film studies. This factor is the quality of realism with which animated film may be imbued. Many of the most important figures who extolled the virtues of the animated medium in the early years of its development felt that animation was liberating and exciting precisely because it could move beyond the aesthetic constraints of realism. The great Russian film innovator Sergei Eisenstein, who was a lifelong admirer of Disney’s work, developed a new concept of ‘plasmaticness’ to encompass animated film’s capacity to reshape reality on its own terms and, implicitly, to critique the mechanical constraints of a machine age, turning its own industrial mode of production to ultimately liberating ends (1988: 21). As Disney moved from the more anarchic terrain of the cartoon short into his distinctive development of the animated feature, however, the company embraced a much more realistic aesthetic. Huge technical and artistic resources were brought to bear on enhancing the capacity of animated film to approximate to the real world in terms of the impression created by movement and surface detail, albeit whilst retaining the licence to interpolate fantasy sequences and devices. Since Disney was to retain a dominant world position within the realm of the animated feature for the next sixty years, this aesthetic shift was obviously of enormous significance and has provoked a range of critical responses amongst theorists and historians of the medium. Michael Barrier epitomizes the hostile view of the new Disney aesthetic when he writes that: ‘Once it had been established that a story was a fairy tale or an animal fable, “fact” dominated, in the form of a very subtle but ultimately parasitic animation, separated from live action only by a leavening of caricature’ (1999: 4). Other writers, such as Paul Wells, have taken up more ambivalent positions, recognizing that while Disney ‘fixed an aesthetic style that was intrinsically bound up with conservatism, consensus and conciliation’ (2002a: 23), modernist elements in the aesthetic also retained the capacity to subvert this tendency and allow more open readings engaged with contemporary agendas.
This issue is of particular importance for the present study because the criticisms levelled at Disney in relation to the way the theme of nature is developed and represented appear to come from opposite, and sometimes contradictory, directions. On the one hand, as we have seen, the dominance of realism is held to inhibit the development of more radical formal strategies that might make the viewer question their relation to what is ‘natural’ in the world. On the other hand, many of the writers who have focused on the theme of nature within Disney animation have taken the films to task for not being realistic enough. Murphy (1995), Lutts (1992) and Schickel (1986) all criticize Disney animated features on the grounds, ultimately, that they create false, sanitized and sweetened images of nature. In the analysis of films that follows I have been keenly aware of this debate but I have tried to avoid falling into line with either of its polarized extremes. I have attempted throughout to be responsive to the particular qualities of films in more flexible ways, trying to avoid what I perceive to be the pitfalls of either an overly judgemental formalism or setting too naïve a standard for realistic authenticity. What I have sought to do instead is to take seriously what I perceive to be major areas of thematic concern within each of the films that I analyze, relating these to ‘real’ social practices, philosophical ideas and cultural anxieties that seem particularly relevant and enlightening. In shaping judgements that emerge from making these connections to the ‘real world’ however, I have tried to keep in focus the particular strategies – the devices, forms and conventions of art, if you like – deployed by these films in embodying their themes. If this critical practice seems unexceptionable (and unexceptional) to some, then I should say that the agendas that have shaped criticism over the past thirty years seem to me to have made it particularly difficult to keep these elements co-ordinated with each other.
One of the problems with applying ‘realism’ as a blanket term in the analysis of Disney films is that the concept actually encompasses a multiplicity of representational practices. It can be too blunt edged a tool to catch the finer distinctions it is necessary to register in order to distinguish changes in the relationship between artistic forms and ideas accurately. Hence, although there are certainly continuities – and indeed formulaic elements – discernible within Disney animation from an early stage, subtle variations, applied in different contexts, can exert a major effect on the way films are perceived. Consider, for instance, the example of Bambi and Finding Nemo, each of whose depictions of natural environments was recognized as pushing towards new heights of realism within the animated medium in the period when they were first released. Yet the realistic aesthetic in these films actually serves quite distinct purposes, as I argue later in the book. Within Bambi the realism is aligned to a conservationist ethos, which is itself changing and under pressure in various respects, while the variations in texture and naturalistic detail work to sensitize the viewer to a particularized forest environment, experienced from the animals’ viewpoint. Although superficially similar (in an updated version, with state-of-the-art computer-generated images, rather than the innovative use of multi-plane cameras that characterizes Bambi), the hyper-realism of Finding Nemo is much less grounded in the local. The film presents the strange beauty of its underwater setting with what one reviewer described as the ‘eye-popping’ sensuousness of an exotic spectacle, while the fish’s epic journey across the oceans meshes animal migration patterns with the global reach of contemporary tourism. The eponymous Nemo is displaced from his native habitat and transported hundreds of miles to an aquarium in Sydney as a trophy resulting from a dentist’s recreational scuba diving trip, while his clown fish father has to follow in the slipstream of migrating turtles to find his lost offspring. The connection between contemporary tourism and the depredation of local environments is not signalled to the viewer with the same moral force as is the hunters’ destructive incursion into the pristine forest in Bambi however, and the realism of Finding Nemo is wedded to a far more post-modern ethos, wide reaching and thought provoking but ambiguous in its effects.
It is not only the quality of realism that structures viewers’ responses to the thematic concerns of animated films however. The way the conventions of particular genres are deployed is clearly as significant as the effect secured by any overarching adherence to principles of realism. Paul Wells has argued that animated films generally are especially protean and more difficult to define in relation to the way they use generic codes than are their live action equivalents (2002b: 45). Although the protean forms within which genres are adapted in animated films may pose problems for analysis, there is no doubt that the generic codes play a fundamental, if subliminal, role in articulating human understandings of and relationships to the natural world in Disney’s films. Disney’s single most impressive achievement in the history of animated film was arguably to demonstrate the commercial and artistic viability of the animated feature. The transition from short cartoon to feature length animation was not simply a question of expansion in terms of running time however. In order to develop themes and plotlines with the capacity to enthral audiences over more substantial periods, new elements had to be brought in to extend the range of the gags and quick-fire comedy that had been the essence of the cartoon short. In a sense, a whole new kind of narrative had to be evolved, with a different focus and set of thematic concerns to those that had prevailed previously.
From the point of view of this study, it is worth recognizing to begin with that the expanded form allowed much greater scope for the depiction of natural environments. The iconic figures who took the lead in many of the earlier shorts – most notably Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck – may have been anthropomorphized animals, but the environments within which they were depicted as interacting, as well as their characteristic gestures, were overwhelmingly human. Donald Duck does not spend significant periods in the cartoons in which he features swimming around ponds and neither does Mickey Mouse engage in activities that have any real bearing on mice. By contrast, right from its inception, the more expansive form of the animated feature grounded itself within environments that were recognizably part of wild nature. Snow White spends barely five minutes within the ambience of the castle environment in the establishing scene at the start of Disney’s first animated feature film, before she is swept off into the heart of the forest. She remains in this archetypal, Arcadian setting for the rest of the film till, in the closing seconds, she rides off with her Prince towards a fairy-tale castle that was to become one of Disney’s stock motifs. Of the feature animations that followed in the 1940s, only Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941) manage to resist the allure of wild nature. The wild animals in Dumbo are caged and have almost completely accommodated themselves to the discipline of the circus environment, even though the comic devices are imbued with a lyricism that hints at the grace of wild nature at times. The other full length animations – Fantasia (1940), and most notably Bambi (1942) – have extensive passages featuring wild environments however, and the natural images within these films cover a wide range of different forms and functions. A number of these functions are developed further in the mixed live action/animated feature Song of the South (1946), with its lively interpolations of the Brer Rabbit stories, and in Sleeping Beauty (1959). Even in Cinderella (1950), where the action appears to be focused more exclusively within a domestic environment, the depiction of an extensive animal subculture serves not only to support the heroine but also to subvert the authority of a repressive, self-regarding human culture that is seen as significantly cut off from the realm of nature.
We will look at a number of these films in more depth in due course. What needs to be noted from the outset though, is that these films’ settings within natural environments do not serve a merely decorative function. In establishing the territory of the expanded new form, Disney also hit upon a distinctive, central area of thematic concern. Underlying the impressive variety of genre and plot with which Disney experimented in the early features, lay a recurrent preoccupation with a key question – ‘What is the meaning of home?’ – that is crucial to the process of children’s growing up and finding a place in the world. However, it is not accidental that the issue of discovering – or remaking – a place that feels like home should so often involve establishing a satisfying and interdependent relationship with nature, and it is here that the genre of pastoral, particularly, comes into play in a number of Disney’s early feature films.
In this respect Snow White is almost paradigmatic. Expelled from the false realm of hate and petty jealousy that is the domain of the wicked Queen, Snow White takes up residence in the forest. Her task here is to refashion a dwelling on her own terms, one that reflects the purity and simple truth of her own being. To achieve this goal she must accept the help of a small army of creatures whose natural home is the forest. To be sure, the role of the animal helper in facilitating the central protagonist’s progress is traditional within fairy and folk tales, and Disney makes extended use of this device here. But Disney’s massive expansion of the role of the animal helper – both in terms of the sheer number of different creatures involved and of the creative energy invested in depicting their activities – allows this traditional narrative function to acquire the weight of a fundamental value of central importance to the story. The participation of the animals in Snow White’s home-making becomes not just a sign that this activity is natural, and therefore good, but also, and beyond this, the very model for an ideal interdependent relationship between human beings and nature, conceived in playful, comedic form.
To open up a substantial new set of thematic concerns in this way requires not only expansion in terms of content but also an extended repertoire of formal devices – adapted so as to express these new concerns – and, in the early features, the Disney animators drew most extensively on the generic codes of pastoral to fulfil this function. Snow White, in particular, turns again and again to popularized adaptations of the pastoral mode in configuring the relationship of the heroine to a natural environment that both surrounds and, in a sense, defines her. This relationship is complex – more so than might appear on initial viewing – and I explore the implications of this at some length in Chapter 1. But it is not just within Disney’s first animated feature that the pastoral mode plays such a crucial role. In varied ways, as I go on to argue, pastoral is central to understanding the significance of nature within all of Disney’s fairy tale adaptations, as well as in Bambi, aspects of Fantasia, and, in a different mode, Song of the South.
Why then are pastoral devices so important within early Disney features? And what aspects of the pastoral mode are drawn on, in particular, to extend and reconfigure the narrative material of these films? We must turn briefly now to examine some of the key assumptions and conventions of pastoral in its historical contexts to begin to answer these questions.
The pastoral mode places human beings in an ideal relationship to the natural world, whether this be wild nature or nature cropped by domesticated animals such as goats and sheep (Gifford, 1999: 1–2). Pastoral can include the labour that nature exacts from men and women, as the price they must pay for living on the land, and can promote awareness of some of the harsher exigencies of a simple existence close to the earth, especially as expressed through the change of seasons. Such hardship is never allowed to dominate however; the keynote of pastoral is an expression of innate sympathy between all living things, at times evoked lyrically and often associated with human sexual love in idealized forms. Within the sub-genre of the eclogue, which Virgil popularized, the pastoral mode became more expansive, encompassing agriculture as well as sheep herding, and offering exemplary accounts of farming life complete with practical detail. The availability of this detailed sense of environment enabled elements of the pastoral genre to be invoked within later writing where natural life was depicted from perspectives less centred on human agency. As narrative and lyric expositions of wild nature became popular from the Romantic period onwards and close observation of the natural world became important within the new sciences, so adapted forms of the pastoral mode came into play alongside its more rustic, or courtly, predecessors. But the essence of the pastoral mode has always been in some sense a retreat or escape: from the hypocrisies and over-sophistication of urban life; from the stresses perceived within contemporary civilization; from injustice and oppression experienced in the arbitrary exercise of power.
The perception that the pastoral genre encapsulates an urge to escape or retreat has left it vulnerable to the charge that it is unrealistic, or even mystifies the real bases of human relationships in ways that are aligned to the interests of those in power. Such viewpoints have given rise to counter-forms – sometimes termed anti-pastoral – which set themselves off against conventional idealizations of country life. Writing in these modes derives integrity and authority from its hard-nosed exposure of the real conditions of rural existence. Crabbe’s eighteenth-century exposé of the destruction of rural communities through enclosure in The Village and Thomas Hardy’s unsparing depiction of the gruelling work undertaken by farm labourers in Tess of the d’Urbervilles are prime examples of this alternative mode of writing.
Within recent literary criticism the kinds of perceptions available in the anti-pastoral mode have been brought to bear on the pastoral tradition with increasing stringency. In The Country and the City, for instance, one of the most trenchant and influential analyses to emerge from this milieu, Raymond Williams subtly – though at times bitingly – reflects on the gap between literary idealizations and their real social base. Of one of the foremost exponents of the pastoral form in the Elizabethan period, Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, he observes sharply, ‘It is not easy to forget that Sidney’s Arcadia, which gives a continuing title to English neo-pastoral, was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants’ (Williams, 1975: 33). In a parallel way, Georgian poetry, which was written largely in pastoral forms during the years leading up to and including World War 1, has appeared weak and evasive to subsequent generations of readers. The extent to which the Georgian poets ignored contemporary realities to focus on rural idealizations made them seem almost wilfully oblivious to events whose scale and savageness would alter perceptions of what humanity could do to nature forever.
The Georgian poets’ allegiance to pastoral as a weak form of denial, a prettifying of stark realities, might well have sounded the death knell for this kind of writing in the twentieth century, at least in Britain. John Barrell and John Bull certainly saw it this way when then they asserted rather polemically, in an introduction to The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, that the history of the pastoral tradition after John Clare was ‘the history of its slow death’ (1974: 3). In fact, however, although some older conventions may have become otiose, the pastoral impulse has shown extraordinary vitality and versatility in the hands of major writers and artists. One has only to think of the very different ways in which the pastoral mode has been given clear eyed definition and purpose by twentieth-century poets such as Thomas Hardy, Sorley Maclean, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney to see that, at least taken in its broadest sense, it is anything but dead.
In part this is perhaps because Ezra Pound’s prescription that twentieth-century writers should ‘make it new’ has allowed experimentation and movement away from a set of literary conventions to which strict adherence would undoubtedly have been stifling. Disney’s own appropriations of pastoral modes and conceits can perhaps best be seen in this context. But the survival of pastoral in a predominantly urban age is also because its modes of representation can be developed in such different directions, at times simultaneously. Though the central urge to recover a harmonious and sympathetic relationship with nature may be inevitably nostalgic in an advanced post-industrial society, the quality of engagement with the world that this impulse engenders is often more ambiguously positioned. For the detailed evocation of a natural environment may carry implicit strains of social criticism within it. The representation of an ideal form of human relationships within nature, far from being simply nostalgic, may become an oblique way of making a stand against the prevailing order of things, a mode of resistance. Pastoral, in a contemporary context, may direct our collective imaginations towards what is in danger of being lost, but which also forms part of our full humanity. It is in this sense that pastoral connects with the project of Disney’s early work for, as Paul Wells has remarked, ‘The ideological imperative in Disney’s “Silly Symphonies” and early features may be understood as populist utopianism, accentuating the positive, the aspirational and the rural, in the face of an advancing modern world’ (2002a: 23).
It may well be that the form in which this potential for both escapist idealization and implicit critique has been developed varies markedly in its Old and New World incarnations. Lawrence Buell, for instance, has argued influentially that the dual nature of the pastoral mode has been developed distinctively by American writers, who have realized its potential both for critically differentiating American sensibilities from their European antecedents and for promoting a new mythos, a radical innocence that insists on respect for what is both primitive and primal within the natural world. This radical innocence, it is also implied, is a core element in American identity, enshrined within characteristic forms of American experience, the constitution and the nation’s founding ideals. Hence, Buell asserts,
Duality was built into American pastoral from the start, for it was conceived as a dream both hostile to the standing order of civilization (decadent Europe, later hypercivilizing America) yet at the same time a model for the civilization in the process of being built. So American pastoral was always both counter-institutional and institutionally sponsored. (1989: 20)
The possibility of a form’s being both ‘counter-institutional and institutionally sponsored’ seems a useful perspective for exploring some of the contradictory elements at work within Disney’s representations of nature. But we should perhaps first try to identify more precisely what this means in the context of the – largely literary – traditions within which Buell locates the paradoxical orientation of American pastoral.
The key to understanding this duality lies in its association with another central term in American nature writing; ‘wilderness’. One of Thoreau’s journal entries for January 1844 provides a useful illustration of how the idea of the wild acquired a central force as a term for evaluating social experience, as well as in perceiving nature as a core value with its own, independent identity. In the journal, Thoreau focuses on the behaviour of a fox that attracts him because he discerns in it ‘a different order of things to that which reigns in the village’ (Knott, 2002: 54). John Knott’s commentary on this passage offers a vivid insight into the creative tensions this perception engenders within Thoreau’s sensibility:
In the Journal one can see Thoreau learning to turn his sense of difference against conventional modes of living and thinking. His perception of the free and elusive ways of the fox triggers a critique of the village mindset in which the fox becomes reduced to vermin, to be controlled by bounties, and is reduced to an example of “proverbial cunning”. By observing the fox’s actual behavior, praising its wildness, and engaging it in a form of play Thoreau distinguishes himself from the village world while at the same time recognizing that he cannot truly enter the world of the fox. (ibid.)
In the passage under consideration, it is an appreciation of the fox’s ‘wildness’, a sense of its inherent difference, that enables Thoreau to make a critical move away from the mindset of his neighbours. The apprehension of wildness as both a quality that is ‘out there’, in nature, and a corresponding inner mode of being, within humans, is entirely characteristic of Thoreau. This wildness is often also associated with ‘wilderness’ in the American pastoral tradition however, and the word acquires a distinctive inflection through this association. For wilderness – almost by definition – is something deemed to be apart from the ordinary domain of the human; its specialness as a region is inherent in its remoteness. Wilderness is a product of separation: the boundary of civilization but also, within American pastoral, the very ground of our redemption. ‘Wilderness is the preservation of the world’ wrote Thoreau, famously. But in that wilderness, in the strict sense of a remote region untouched by human intervention, does not exist in most of Europe or densely populated England, access to such space must perforce involve a journey, while the imaginative spur offered by proximity to such regions remains distinctively an American experience. Wilderness as a concept does not have the same associations in Australia, Asia or the rest of the world. In terms of American pastoral then, not only does the value placed on the idea of wilderness take on a critical edge in relation to normative attitudes within society but also makes the quest for a connection with wild nature part of a larger drive to re-assimilate the primitive (indeed the primal) into contemporary experience. It is for this reason that the trope of learning from the North American Indians is common within American pastoral generally and utterly central to Thoreau’s writing.
It may seem that we have now strayed a long way from the world of Disney, and the animated adaptations of the fairy tale that became his trademark. Yet, if we take Snow White to be a model, whose key elements later fairy-tale animations revisit in different forms, then a case can be made for seeing Disney’s most successful adapted genre as related to many of the central concerns of American pastoral. For Snow White, like Thoreau, undertakes a journey of self-discovery into the wilderness, learning to become more self-reliant in the process. Like Thoreau too, she has a particular affinity for the forest, even though there are aspects of the forest that initially feel alien to her and elicit terror. Despite his deep love of trees – and the pine in particular – Thoreau also acknowledged an alien and fearful aspect to his experiences there. ‘What is most striking in the Maine wilderness, is the continuousness of the forest’, he wrote in Ktaadn. He goes on to explain that
It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the country indeed is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from the hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree. (2004: 80)
We will return later to the image of the ‘wet and miry’, which operates as an important transitional zone in the early stages of Snow White’s journey, and which exercised a profound imaginative attraction for Thoreau all his life. However it is worth noting here that, although there is no precise equivalent in Snow White for the role played by the North American Indian in Thoreau’s journeys, both the dwarves and the forest animals have analogous functions in that the innocence they represent is, to an extent, both primitive and uncivilized.
The tone and ambience of Disney’s Snow White are, of course, very different from anything found in Thoreau’s writing, not only because it is realized through the medium of the animated cartoon but also because its mode is that of sentimental comedy. Perhaps even more importantly, Disney has significantly revised the thematic preoccupations of the pastoral mode incorporated into the narrative, reviewing them from the perspective of an adolescent girl. The masculine prerogatives of the pastoral tradition have been feminized and, in Disney, the realm of the domestic is allowed to predominate.
As it happens, this preoccupation with nature in relation to the sphere of the domestic also marks a major distinction between films I shall be reviewing at different historical phases in this book. These phases can be distinguished as the period presided over by Walt Disney himself (1937–1966) and the period when Michael Eisner was corporate head and exerted a decisive influence on policy in relation to the company’s animated feature productions (1984–2005). The animated features produced in between these two eras are of much less interest with respect to the themes explored in this book (and are arguably of less artistic quality). This historical division is also useful in that it enables contrasts and continuities to be explored between cultural contexts that have changed substantially. I have used this division to structure the argument of the first six chapters but I am aware that, as the focus moves towards the twenty-first century, such a straightforward contrast becomes less useful to sustain. This is partly because Michael Eisner resigned from his post as CEO of the Walt Disney Company in 2005, so that the films produced after this can hardly be characterized as belonging to a putative ‘Eisner era’. But it is also because, from 1995 onwards, Pixar really began to seize the creative initiative from the more traditional wing of Disney animation and took feature animation into some strikingly different territories. For the purposes of this book I have chosen to position Pixar films as part of the Disney tradition, although I am aware that the company remains autonomous in terms of its creative organization with, in many ways, a very distinctive aesthetic. There is though, I would argue, sufficient continuity in terms of the perspectives I am exploring in this book to justify the approach I am outlining here. The makers of Finding Nemo, after all, saw Bambi as a touchstone for what they were trying to achieve in terms of visual texture and emotion (Cotta Vaz, 2003: 21). From 2006 onwards, when Disney formally bought Pixar and John Lasseter was given overall responsibility for all animation projects in both companies, a high degree of continuing cross influence would seem to have been assured. The additional last chapter and conclusion of the updated edition of this book therefore move beyond both the ‘Eisner era’ and the previous categories I had developed for analysis, to explore significant new directions.
Although they have each come under considerable critical scrutiny in recent years, it is clear that both Walt Disney and Michael Eisner saw themselves as having a sustained and strong commitment to wild nature and the environment, whatever line one takes on gaps between professed ideals and corporate practices. The nature of this commitment was different however, and found expression in fundamentally altered historical circumstances, whose characteristics I have tried to delineate in the relevant chapters. Walt Disney’s image of himself was founded especially on the formative years of his childhood spent in the small-town farming community of Marceline, where his interest in graphic arts had its inception in early attempts to draw the domestic and wild animals that he grew up alongside (Eliot 1995: 7–8). The relationship with wild nature that predominates in Disney’s animated films is folksy and homespun. Where it focuses on female protagonists, its imagery draws on contemporary ideologies that associated women with both the realm of the natural and with domestic work. Eisner’s roots, by contrast, were urban and cosmopolitan. He was brought up in a wealthy family living on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Eisner was strongly committed to environmental ideals when he took over at Disney. He co-founded the Environmental Media Association at the end of the 1980s to promote awareness of environmental issues within the Hollywood film industry generally (Ingram 2000: 20). But he did so in a more overtly politicized and self-conscious era, and was aware of a need to update the idiom within which Disney animations expressed their themes and concerns. Whilst retaining an element of the family-orientated innocence of the old Disney, the new films consciously cultivated the sassy rather than the homespun and began to show some awareness of the new political agendas focused around race, feminism and environmentalism. The tone and consciousness of the films presided over by Eisner, in what is sometimes termed the ‘Disney revival’, are thus substantially changed.
Although the division between the periods of Disney and Eisner animated features provides a useful axis for analysis however, the structure of this book does not follow this historical division in a straightforward manner. This is because I consider that three rather different types of animated films engaged with the theme of wild nature were created during the Disney era and that later films are best construed as developments, or revisions, of these three founding categories. Rather than following a straightforward historical path through all the relevant Disney animated features from Snow White (1937) to Brother Bear (2003) and more recent films therefore, I have followed developments separately within each of the three types of film that I discriminate as operating within fundamentally different agendas. Each type is allocated a different section in the book and the contrast between the perspectives offered by films from the Disney and Eisner eras respectively is explored in a separate chapter within each section. In this way I hope that the analysis retains a focus on historical developments linked to changing cultural contexts, whilst also giving full weight to the different forms within which the concerns that are at the centre of this study were developed. What follows then is a brief justification of the sections into which I have divided the analysis.
In a sense, this category of Disney animations needs little justification since fairy tale adaptations are of such central importance within the Disney canon and clearly constitute a distinct genre. The relationship of the animated fairy tale adaptation to the theme of wild nature requires more careful elucidation however. Although rural settings, animal helpers and the motif of sympathy between nature and the principal protagonists are all common elements in traditional versions of fairy tales, there was no necessity for Disney to extend the significance of these features when adapting classic tales. Arguably indeed, wild nature figures in relatively minor ways in the literary fairy tale Pinocchio (animated by Disney after Snow White in 1940) and is not of central importance as a theme within more recent, non-Disney, animation drawing extensively on fairy-tale material, such as the Shrek films. Disney’s decision to bring his versions of the fairy tale so richly into association with the theme of wild nature is therefore distinctive and is developed further, though in rather different forms, in the two major adaptations of the Eisner period, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.
Fairy tales work through archetypes and, at their best, produce apparently simple narratives with rich symbolic associations. My analysis of Disney’s fairy tale adaptations explores some of the further symbolic associations drawn into the animated film when such brief narratives are extended, dramatized and embodied in graphic form. Although the distanced, otherworldliness of the fairy tale would seem to deal in universals, I suggest that the symbolic associations of Disney’s films also touch on more specific cultural anxieties and longings connected to perceptions of nature from their time. Rituals concerned with dirt and cleaning and imagery connecting nature with the domestic space of the home are particularly important in this respect. While the cultural work of the films of the Disney era tends towards making wild nature safe however, as it is made to perform in harmony with domestic rituals, films from the Eisner period appear to dramatize a symbolic rift between the realms of the human and the natural. The later films eventually reconcile this rift in potentially complex ways. Chapters 1 and 2 explore some of the implications of these patterns, relating their significance to shifts in cultural perceptions of the meaning of nature – and of female roles in particular – between these respective periods.
This category is based on setting, rather than genre, and is invoked to explore some of the ways in which Disney animation has engaged with one of the central topics in North American environmental writing: the meaning and implications of ‘wilderness’. Only one animated film from the Disney era, Bambi, falls into this category, though this is perhaps the single most important film engaged with the themes covered by this book. Although Disney did not return to the territory explored within Bambi in the animated medium, one might suggest that he continued to pursue the themes evoked here in live action and especially within the wildlife documentaries that were so successful during the 1950s. Bambi’s focus is on natural history, rather than human history, though the incursion of hunters into the idyllic forest setting halfway through the film suggests that it is preoccupied with the relationship between wilderness and humans in an archetypal form. This focus is removed from any specific historical context however, since the hunters’ presence is never represented directly. This dehistoricized approach – combined with the absence of American Indians from the landscape – is significant in a number of ways. In particular, it allows the film to connect with North American traditions of thought and iconography in the representation of wilderness, in forms that suggest interesting ambiguities and occlusions.
When the idea of wilderness was returned to in the Eisner era, it was embedded within a full, if romantically mythologized, historical context in the story of the Indian princess Pocahontas. The historicized approach taken in Pocahontas appears to be self-consciously revisionist, particularly in its attempt to bring a sympathetic version of North American Indian culture and history centre stage, even though the project as a whole is fraught with contradictions. Chapter 4 explores the implications of some of these contradictions, clarifying these particularly through a close comparison with DreamWorks’ Spirit, which also tries to explore the meaning of wilderness in a quasi-historical context. It is interesting that the latest Disney film that falls into this category, Brother Bear, fights shy of the difficulties posed for a children’s film in confronting the politics of landscape, setting its sentimental fable in prehistory (as defined from a white settlers’ perspective) in a mythologized version of Inuit culture towards the end of the last Ice Age.
Again this category is defined by setting rather than by genre, although there are some generic resemblances between the films discussed in this section. The principal films explored under this category are The Jungle Book (1967), The Lion King (1994), Tarzan (1999) and Finding Nemo (2003). Of these, only The Jungle Book was conceived and largely produced during the Disney era and even this film might be thought of as transitional, exploring new territory within the Disney animation tradition that was to prove increasingly fruitful as a creative arena in the period at the end of the century when globalization had become fully developed.
The setting of these films within the tropics provides them with the allure of the exotic. Although care may be taken to imbue the environments depicted with recognizable and distinctive qualities – The Jungle Book’s atmosphere is evocative of the tropical paintings of Le Douanier Rousseau, the palette of The Lion King carefully chosen to suggest the colours and light of Africa, and so on – the ultimate aim is not to create the impression of a realistic landscape. The exotic distancing effect created by tropical settings instead creates a kind of dreamscape where, to an even greater extent than in other kinds of Disney animation, fantasies and deep-seated cultural longings can be projected and worked through. Hence, rather than being structured around the patterns of a quasi-realistic natural history, as in Bambi, these films tend to take up the quest for a harmonious natural world, within which humans can be fully integrated, in the form of popularized myths. The most potent of these myths is that of the feral child, brought up to be at home in the natural world but then seeking accommodation with his biological human identity. The narratives of both The Jungle Book and Tarzan are founded upon this myth. But the driving force behind the plots of these films more generally is that of restoration – of a proper order within the natural world in The Lion King, of the family reconciled to both the dangers and pleasures of its home environment on the reef in Finding Nemo – and the plot of restoration involves working through competing ideas about the natural world as well as elements of human psychology.
It is in this latter sense – scenarios that allow contrasting ideas to be playfully contested within the more traditional format of character based, comic adventure – that these films are particularly rich in relation to the themes explored in this book. The narratives of these films tend to be structured around a journey and it is striking how many focus on buddy relationships – Mowgli with Bagheera and Baloo in The Jungle Book, Dora and Marlin in Finding Nemo – that allow competing attitudes and ideas to be bounced off each other particularly effectively. Although the plots effect closure, the effect of this dialectical interplay of ideas often leaves the films more open ended in terms of interpretation and response than might at first appear. Like the films examined in other categories within this book, but perhaps more clearly because set off in forms of debate, these comic dramas allow audiences to rehearse some of the most important desires and anxieties of our contemporary culture in forms that offer both consolation and the release of laughter. Though they may be partially escapist, such films – at their best – also have the potential for putting us in touch with issues, in playful forms and, I argue, can allow audiences to think as well as feel.