Most viewers would agree that the best animated films “offer the greatest potential for expressing a variety of divergent points of view, while at the same time accommodating a dominant paradigm of established social meaning” (Wells Animation and America 13). This perspective includes the enviro-toon, animated shorts and feature films with ecology at their center from the 1930s to the present.
Although most of the enviro-toons from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s demonstrate the power of nature over the human world, some of the period’s animated shorts respond to human, organismic, and economic approaches to ecology by critiquing human exploitation of the natural world and illustrating the consequences of rampant consumerism that serves as a sign of progress—devastation of the natural world. Instead of looking at nature from the skewed perspective of a speeding car, enviro-toons from the post-World War II era, including Porky Chops and Lumber Jerks show us what’s wrong with what Wilson calls “the cultural taming of the American Wilderness” (34) and provide real reasons for embracing Aldo Leopold’s conservation aesthetic.
For example, Hare Conditioned (1945) seems to illustrate Aldo Leopold’s view of recreation gone wrong. Hare Conditioned takes the artificiality of outdoor recreation to an extreme, when a camp scene turns into a department store window display. Here outdoor recreation is not only mechanized (as Leopold argues). It’s an illusion. As in other Bugs Bunny cartoons, in Hare Conditioned, Bugs ends up outsmarting his opponent—this time, the store manager—avoiding a more deadly artificial display of nature: the manager attempts (and fails) to add Bugs to his stuffed animal display in the taxidermy department. Putting nature on display here highlights what Dana Phillips calls representation rather than presence. Hare Conditioned shows us nature—and outdoor recreation—in a showroom like the living room where Carl Hiaasen’s protagonist, Dennis Gault, in the novel Double Whammy lays out his bass tackle. According to Phillips, the display window and the stuffed woods animals in Double Whammy act as “monuments to a disappearing natural world” (209), just like those on display in the taxidermy section of Bugs’s department store. These two examples seem to spring directly from Leopold’s aesthetic philosophy.
By 1953, however, Jack Warner “ordered the animation units [temporarily] to close down, to make way for 3D movies” (Klein 206). Television became a new dominant media, and fewer movie screens were available for audiences. All of these factors led to what Klein calls a “stripped-down” version of cartoons. Klein argues that a “mixture of ebullience and paranoia can be seen very clearly in fifties cartoons, in the stories and the graphics” (207). According to Klein, this mixture “is particularly evident in cartoons about consumer life” (207). The conflict between humans and machines consumerism has bred is explored in cartoons like Porky Chops, Boobs in the Woods (1950) and Lumber Jerks and extended to include the natural resources necessary to create consumer goods.
Porky Pig in Porky Chops focuses on destruction of a forest caused by need for lumber resources. In Porky Chops, the less anthropomorphized animal—a bear that appears first on all four legs in a hollow log—takes control and ends the clear cutting of a forest by Porky Pig. The bear’s college letter sweater, however, suggests that human intervention both potentially destroys and domesticates wild nature. Boobs in the Woods critiques outdoor recreation in more subtle ways than Hare Conditioned, while also making a statement about the loss of wild nature. In Boobs in the Woods, Daffy disrupts Porky Pig (as usual), but Daffy’s aim seems to be to stop Porky from painting a natural landscape. Porky camps out in his trailer in a “wilderness” so tamed that it looks more like a golf course than a wild forest, but he fails to capture the scene on canvas. A simple critique, perhaps, of increasing outdoor recreation after WWII, but here the conflict is unresolved.
Of the cartoons from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s we viewed, however, the one most clearly an enviro-toon is Goofy Gophers and the Lumber Jerks. Lumber Jerks seems to emanate from an attitude in 1950s America that Klein calls “Consumer Cubism” (210), “an obsession with the efficient, angular plan.” The faster a consumer could gain access to goods, the better. Klein claims “individualism and democracy were being redefined in terms of consumer desire. The homogeneous surface, open and ‘free,’ came to stand in for America’s imperium” (210). These attitudes were reflected in both narrative and aesthetics of cartoons after 1954.
Like Porky Chops, Lumber Jerksfirst focuses on saving one tree in a forest—but the conclusion differs dramatically. Two cheerful gophers scurry toward their home tree, but when they go up into the hollow of the tree, they find it has been cut down and carried away. The two gophers take steps to retrieve their tree—what they call their property—tracking it to a river and then picking it out of the hundreds of logs floating on the water. They climb on their tree and row away but cannot fight the current and nearly go over a waterfall. Once they escape, one gopher exclaims, “I’m bushed,” and the two fall asleep, waking up only after entering a lumber mill, surviving a saw blade cutting their tree trunk in two.
After seeing the devastation around them, the gophers state the obvious about the repercussions of consumerism. One of the gophers explains, “It looks like they are bent on the destruction of our forests,” and the scene shifts to the mill’s workings. One “shot” shows trees ground into sawdust being made into artificial fireplace logs. Another shows an entire tree being “sharpened” to produce one toothpick. Then the gophers discover what had happened to their own tree: “They’re going to make furniture out of our tree,” states one.
But the idea of ownership of consumer goods extends to the gophers and their tree home. They wish to reclaim their property, their own possession, so the other gopher exclaims, “That is definitely our property. We must think of a way to repossess it.” The gophers siphon the gas out of the furniture truck and, when it breaks down, “steal” their tree’s furniture from the truck. They build a tree house with the furniture, adding branches for good measure and topping the tree off with a television set. The cartoon ends with one of the gophers telling the other, “Isn’t our home much better than it was before ….[we have] Television… and just think how much better it will be with electricity!”
As Klein asserts in his discussion of Tex Avery’s Car of Tomorrowand The Farm of Tomorrow, consumers may become “victimized by the very machines that promise an easier, more extravagant life” (211). After all, the consumer goods that make up the trunk of one tree were built from the trees of an entire forest. Lumber Jerks, especially, reflects an increasing ambivalence toward technology and post-World War II progress in an increasingly more complex (and anxiety-ridden) nuclear age. Here the Goofy Gophers successfully negotiate between the wonders of modernism and its impact on both natural and human worlds Paul Wells discusses. But it’s a negotiation that’s impossible in the world outside cartoons.
No comments:
Post a Comment