Happy Feet and Human Ecology: A Century of Environmentalism

Although animated features from 1937 to the present reflect their own cultural and historical contexts, they also continue to follow narrative and aesthetic patterns found in our investigation of animated shorts of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Perhaps because they are products of either modernist industrial culture or a postmodern culture driven by technology, animated features embedded with environmental messages also continue to reflect the influence of human, economic, organismic, and chaotic approaches to ecology, illustrating aesthetic patterns that encourage separation between human and nonhuman nature or their interconnection through interdependent relationships. Happy Feet (2006) is a case in point.

Harking back to the species survival message of Fox Pop, Happy Feet is, according to an Onion A.V. Club review by Tasha Robinson, “a gorgeously rendered marvel that pulls out all the stops to wow its viewers” while maintaining “its integrity with a smart and surprisingly deep story.” Employing long takes and a moving camera, the film provides “heightened elegance and precision as well as a strong sense of space” and effective use of motion-capture techniques, according to Variety’s Todd McCarthy. But the film also attempts to convey two perhaps conflicting themes which Jordan Harper defines as “be yourself” and “we must regulate the overfishing of the Antarctic oceans” in his Village Voice review. Harper suggests these dual themes dilute the film’s message, but we see the environmental theme overshadowing the individualist motif Harper describes, providing environmental messages grounded in organismic and human ecology coupled with tenets of the animal rights movement.

Happy Feet highlights nature from its opening forward, with shots of Northern Lights that look like the Milky Way and an opening camera move toward a globe from space, as in films from Dark City to An Inconvenient Truth and WALL-E. The camera pans onto an icy surface in helicopter shots, revealing a community of penguins to individualize this view of the natural world. In this idealized animated world, however, penguins sing “heart songs” that demonstrate their inner essence and connect them with other members of their species. In this opening scene, two of the penguins, Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) and Memphis (Hugh Jackman) mate by singing a duet of “You Don’t Have to be Rich,” eventually hatching the egg that incubates the film’s protagonist, Mumble (Elijah Wood).

From this point, the film broadcasts at least two social and potentially environmental messages. The first serves as a catalyst for Mumble’s journey to the human world: Because Mumble is born with different skills than the other penguins, dancing rather than singing like his parents, he teaches them a lesson of acceptance and tolerance rooted in organismic ecology after demonstrating the folly of their choice to ostracize him.

The second combines tenets of the animal rights movement with human approaches to ecology: Penguins will starve if humans continue to over fish and pollute the seas. Because they blame the diminishing sea life on Mumble and his inability to sing, the penguin community banishes him, and Mumble discovers a large Caterpillar earth mover near the shore that suggests some other reason for the penguins’ lack of food. He recruits a group of smaller penguins and their oracle, Lovelace (Robin Williams), slowly being strangled by plastic from a six pack burrowing into his neck, to discover both the reason for the diminishing fish supplies and the species behind the huge machine.

Ultimately Mumble and his entourage discover the cause for their famine, what elephant seals call the “annihilator,” humans that even eat whales. At a shipyard, they discover the source of the fish shortage: unrestrained fishing and waste disposal. But since Mumble and the others are powerless to stop this large force, Mumble swims after the ship to appeal “to its better nature” and is “carried endlessly across vast oceans to worlds unknown,” according to the narrator.

When he climbs on shore, however, Mumble is captured and placed in a penguin habitat and finds a way to save himself and his fellow penguins from starvation. While trapped in the zoo, Mumble dances in front of a glass window. And when a little girl dances along with him, a crowd watches in amazement. The humans all think Mumble communicates with them through his tapping so, as a sentient being, he and his fellow penguins are seen as valuable enough to save. They have the same rights as humans and deserve to survive, so, after placing a locator on his leg, they take him back to his icy home.

The film’s conclusion resolves both social issues. Mumble is accepted back into his now more tolerant “biotic” penguin family. And, in a narrowly-focused environmental outcome, ocean fishing is curbed to ensure penguins survive after humans follow his locator and again respond to his dancing. Mumble’s transmitter has brought them there, and Mumble explains that the alien humans put the food chain out of whack, and they want to help. All the penguins now dance and sing. Humans watching from a snowy hill exclaim, “Are they trying to tell us something? We’re messing with their food chain. Abandon all marine harvesting!” Now fishing will cease because these humans can’t imagine a world without penguins, a resolution that may disregard greater environmental problems like global warming but at least points toward the need for maintaining both human and nonhuman nature, a significant starting point perhaps drawn more from both the animal rights movement and a conservation movement grounded in human approaches to ecology.