Rankin/Bass Studios, Nature, and the Supernatural: Where Technology Serves and Destroys

Rankin/Bass Studios, Nature, and the Supernatural: Where Technology Serves and Destroys

Unlike other animation studios, Rankin Bass, a pairing of Arthur Rankin, Jr.’s artistic ability and Jules Bass’s more business-conscious and practical understanding, produced stop-action animated shorts and features in which technological savvy was used to interrogate a variety of technological advances. In these films, technology is constructed as either a dream maker or a machine that disrupts a mythic natural garden. Although the studio is most well-known for producing a series of holiday iconic television specials, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, it also created at least four feature-length critiques of modernity, three in the 1960s, and the last, their only hand-drawn feature, in 1982. These four animated features draw on the combined, perhaps contrasting, strengths of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass. As Rankin explains, ”our intention was to combine his advertising know-how with my television and artistic know-how” (qtd. in Goldschmidt and Sykora). 

This pairing of opposites seems to coincide with the two conflicting themes prevalent in the few feature films produced by the partners. Two of the four Rankin/Bass animated features released by the studio—Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965) and Mad Monster Party? (1967)—demonstrate the force of technology but also illustrate ways it can be integrated effectively into the world of human and nonhuman nature when used for constructive rather than destructive purposes. The Daydreamer (1966) and The Last Unicorn (1982), on the other hand, argue against disrupting the garden (a literal Garden of Eden in The Day Dreamer) with knowledge and technology that overwhelm faith. Together, however, these four films all assert the need to guard against misuse of technology, science, and an epistemology that valorizes humans over nature. Mad Monster Party? most effectively advocates interdependence, however, since it offers hope that, when used effectively, artifacts of modern culture can serve both human and nonhuman nature.

Although based in science fiction rather than fact, Willy McBean and His Magic Machine uses animagic to illustrate the dangers of placing a technological wonder like a time machine into the wrong hands, those of a mad scientist who wants to write himself literally into history. With this time machine, Professor Von Rotten attempts to integrate himself into key moments in Western history: replacing Wild Bill in a Tombstone, Arizona gunfight, discovering America instead of Christopher Columbus, pulling King Arthur’s sword from the stone, building the pyramids, and discovering fire for cave dwellers. With help from the professor’s monkey, Pablo, however, Willy builds his own time machine and stops all of the professor’s attempts. Ultimately, he successfully controls technology in Willy McBean, so that history can be preserved and the balance between nature and culture can be maintained.

Mad Monster Party?, on the other hand, takes this critique further and anticipates and reacts to technological advances (the potential of nuclear weapons destroying humankind), illustrating one way to adapt to a changing landscape: destroy the monsters of humanity so that a “kinder” technology can prevail. In Mad Monster Party, technology is interrogated as both a dream maker and a machine that disrupts the garden. This stop action “animagic” film focuses on a mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, who has created the means to destroy matter. He declares, “Ha ha ha. Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.' I've done it. Created the means to destroy matter. They must all know. Know that I, Baron von Frankenstein, master of the secret of creation, have now mastered the secret of destruction,” so he invites his monster colleagues to celebrate his discovery.  

            With this premise in place, monsters from Dracula to the Invisible Man fight for Frankenstein’s formula. Frankenstein is retiring while “he’s on top” and turning over all of his secrets to his nephew, Felix, a young pharmacist. After Frankenstein saves his nephew by destroying himself, the other monsters, and his island, Felix floats off with Frankenstein’s assistant and his newfound love, Francesca. But the film ends with a twist. Francesca is “just a machine with hundreds of parts that will eventually wear out.” And by the film’s end, Felix also seems more like a machine than a human. The film, then, replaces the violent destruction of “monsters” like us with (apparently) peaceful android technology.

In The Daydreamer and The Last Unicorn, however, any machine in the garden disrupts its peace. These Rankin/Bass features—the first a mixture of live action and animagic, the second traditional cel-drawn animation—illustrate the danger of technological advancement and the knowledge on which it builds. Technology in these two features proves too destructive to facilitate, even in hands that are more “peaceful.” Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden describes America as a lush, unexplored “garden” that is in a tumultuous relationship with the “machine,” or social and technological advancements throughout American history. The “machine” overwhelms the “garden” and attempts to cultivate raw resources for consumption. Marx’s thesis, therefore, is that the “machine” alters the landscape in order to make it fit current measures of productivity. Both Daydreamer and The Last Unicorn reinforce this premise.

In The Last Unicorn, as in Daydreamer, the world of nature conflicts with the destructive technology-driven world of culture, even in the films’ fantasy settings. Yet, in a move that harks back to Leo Marx, as in Mad Monster Party?, interdependent relationships between humans and the natural world preserve the garden. The Last Unicorn must pair up with a wizard to free other unicorns and preserve the natural world they sustain. Chris, the Daydreamer, learns that the garden he seeks can only exist if nonhuman nature is preserved. These four films from Rankin/Bass Studios demonstrate the power of human-driven or supernatural technology as a force that destroys when placed in most humans’ hands. Only those willing to view the relationship between nature and culture as interdependent will save and maintain a “garden” that ultimately preserves us all, a garden preserved, perhaps, by a land ethic rooted in organismic approaches to ecology.