The Swarm as Eco-disaster

The Swarm (1978) includes an all-star cast and a disaster film director and storyline but focuses on the consequences of killer bees and multiple ways to eradicate them. Despite its environmental opening, however, it falls back on cliched plot points drawn from the typical disaster films of the period.

The film's attempts at bringing in an environmental message when two contrasting characters are introduced, General Thompson (Richard Widmark), the commanding officer on a military base, and Dr. Bradford Crane (Michael Cain), a PhD from Princeton and Cambridge and an entomologist. Something has killed almost everyone in a military outpost, and Crane wants to help discover and combat the culprit. When a huge swarm of bees attacks air search planes, they come closer to discovering the truth. Although General Thompson opposes the plan, the President authorizes Crane to put together a team to thwart the bee invasion.

A family picnicking serves as the next test case. The two parents are killed, but Paul, the son, survives and is taken to the nearest town hospital in Maryville, which is planning a Flower Festival. Here the narrative gets off track with the mayor (Fred MacMurray) and Felix (Ben Johnson) fighting for Maureen’s (Olivia de Havilland) affections.

But the story gets back on point when Paul drives into town blowing the car horn as he crashes into flowers: “They got my mom and my dad!” As if in answer, Dr. Crane declares, “The war that I always talked about has finally started” and assembles a team to discover a method to eradicate the bees without destroying other life with pesticides and prepare an antidote for their venom. 

Before ultimate victory, however, more townspeople are terrorized by the bees, especially after Paul and his friends blow up their hives and scatter them toward Marysville. The bees even attack school children unable to make it into the building. The bees strike a nuclear power plant and shut down electricity throughout the area, as well.

The bees eventually reach Houston, as well, but now the people have been evacuated in time. Only military personnel and Crane’s crew, including Helena (Katharine Ross), a doctor, remain. The general takes over the operation now because he thinks Crane has failed and orders men to burn the bees with flamethrowers. Many of the men are killed, and then they bring the bees into the Houston compound, so Crane tries one more experiment. He uses sound to entice the bees to leave the city and fly out to sea where they are bombed and presumably destroyed. In The Swarm, however, the killer bees carry deadly levels of venom, a major deviation from reality that moves the film from eco-message to traditional disaster film.

Animation, Live-Action, and the Environment

Live action has combined with animation from nearly the beginning of film history. Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, which he wrote, directed and produced in 1914, is an apt example. In this twelve-minute silent film Gertie, an animated dinosaur, interacts with a live-action world, somewhat like Disney’s Pete’s Dragon (1977) did years later. The animation allows a whimsical plot point to take shape, so that McCay can interact with an animated character that just happens to be a prehistoric now-extinct herbivore named Gertie. At the end of the film, McCay takes a ride on Gertie’s back to show she does not fear him, an effect made possible because of animation. McCay’s hand drawn animation allowed him to transcend the rules of live action. Including himself in the film heightened the effect of the whimsy on display. This lure of animation continues today. A David Carr 2003 New York Times column explains, “Because animation is less rule-bound than live action, writers can use the kind of shtick that would seem preposterous on film …. In a medium in which a character can end up smoking a stick of dynamite, people expect something surprising with each advancing frame.” When combined with live-action, animation offers a contrast to the rules of live-action that stuns as it entertains. It also sometimes offers up opportunities for ecocritical readings that highlight either a valorization of nonhuman nature or a critique of humans’ exploitation of the natural world.

Some films, however, intertwine animation and live action to demonstrate conflicts as well as connections between human and nonhuman nature, as in King Kong (1933) and Song of the South (1946). In Dangerous When Wet(1953), for example, Katie Higgins (Esther Williams) swims with Tom and Jerry in a dream sequence that reveals her own romantic battle between Andre Lanet (Fernando Lamas) and her own natural inclination to swim, even as far as across the English Channel. In her cartoon dream sequence, Lanet becomes an animated octopus who holds her tight with tentacles, even when she swims away with Tom and Jerry’s assistance. When Higgins awakens, she is pulling herself out of bed, connecting animation with live action through a filmic bridge. Ultimately, Higgins swims the English Channel, but with Lanet’s support rather than his resistance, perhaps connecting Higgins’ “nature” with the culture of romance.  

Four films from different decades in which live action and animation are interconnected move beyond entertainment and illustrate not only the interdependence of two aesthetic forms but of the worlds of nature and culture. The Girl Next Door (1953), The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1962), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and Enchanted (2007) all intertwine live action with animation, but they also illustrate blatant environmental messages about the need for interconnected relationships between human and nonhuman nature.  

The Girl Next Door uses animated sequences from UPA to highlight both the bifurcation between nature and culture, and, in the second sequence, their alliance through a Noah’s Ark scene that also illuminates human generational differences. The Girl Next Door, a Twentieth Century Fox musical, integrates animation into two key scenes that foreground a comic artist’s son and demonstrate the bifurcation of nature and culture.

 

The Incredible Mr. Limpet reinforces this interdependence, since in the film an animated fish, Henry Limpet (Don Knotts) helps the United States Navy destroy Nazi U-Boats during WWII. Limpet, however, becomes a fish when he falls in the Coney Island Bay because he values fish and their lifestyle more than the human life he leads with his wife Bessie (Carole Cook) and best friend and rival George Stickel (Jack Weston). The film, then, both valorizes “peaceful” aquatic life and reinforces the need for an interdependent relationship between human and nonhuman nature.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) connects human and nonhuman nature in an urban setting because animated figures from “Toontown” are anthropomorphized animals. But the film makes a more explicit statement about humans’ treatment of the environment that draws on both human and organismic approaches to ecology by foregrounding and critiquing two destructive practices: toxic chemical use and disposal and overdevelopment of the landscape. The villain, Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), first creates a toxic chemical mixture of turpentine, acetone, and benzene called Dip that will destroy all the “toons” and clear Toontown for a destructive construction project, a superhighway around which Doom plans to build hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and strip malls. When combined with his elimination of urban mass transit systems, such destruction and overdevelopment blatantly attacks the natural world. 

Enchanted, on the other hand, maintains a separation between the live-action and animated sequences, with the majority of the film responding to the series of animated fairy tale features that have been part of Disney fare since 1937’s Snow White. In Enchanted, as in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, the female protagonist, Giselle (Amy Adams), maintains an interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature. In the animated space of the film’s opening, forest animals from blue birds to rabbits and an owl follow the pattern of the earlier Disney films and help prepare her for marriage by replicating the figure of a prince (James Marsden) whom Giselle encounters in the forest and then, after she and the prince are engaged, coifing her hair and dress on the way to the wedding. 

In the live-action world Giselle enters when pushed into a well, she establishes a similar interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature, but she is now in an urban setting and summons pigeons, rats, and cockroaches instead of woodland creatures when she hums her working song. The animals help her clean her new friend’s (Patrick Dempsy) apartment in a scene that comically points out the ridiculous nature of this conceit. When mice and bunnies become rats and cockroaches, they no longer meet the “cute” standard of Disney films, but they serve a similar ludicrous role—serving a Princess-in-Waiting by cleaning her house and sewing her clothing. Yet in Enchanted, nature and culture, nonhuman and human nature, meet head on and, in fantasy, demonstrate the effectiveness of interdependent relationships, and, perhaps, demonstrating, at least metaphorically, the pull toward a biotic organismic community.

Combining live action with animation provides an effective way to emphasize the nature/culture binary, but it also, in these four films, highlights ways this binary breaks down when the two “worlds” collide, demonstrating the interdependent, interconnected relationships between human and nonhuman nature. Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes this connection further by critiquing humans’ destruction of the natural world, either through toxic chemicals meant to kill toons or overdevelopment meant to pave over a natural (if animated) landscape and serve a consumer culture driven by unhindered greed. Although other later films combine live action with animation—see for example, Waking Life (2001), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Avatar(2009)—The Girl Next Door, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Enchanted most effectively demonstrate how such a mix may also illustrate the necessary alliance between the worlds of nature and culture and the ongoing influence of human and organismic approaches to ecology.

Rodan as Eco-Film

Some may say that Rodan (1956) could be defined as an eco-film only if the American opening is included to connect the birth of Rodan with radiation exposure. From our perspective, however, the original Japanese version also raises environmental concerns, this time associated with the more everyday eco-disasters that are a product of the mining industries. Keeping in mind that Inoshiro Honda, the director of Rodan, was an assistant to Kajiro Yamamoto, who made documentary-styled films that were a huge influence on Akira Kurosawa as well as the Japanese documentary movement, might provide insight into this reading. Yamamoto is responsible for documentaries such as Horse, for example, a neo-realist film about horse-breeding shot on location in wintry, difficult terrain, a setting and subject that, perhaps, link it with the environmental cinema movement.

The American version of Rodan opens with stock footage from several U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing. The first, “Mission Gigantic,” takes place “in the faraway Pacific on a tiny island atoll, miles away from inhabited land” and watched “from a battleship in the remote Pacific from which all shipping has been banned. During the mission, we see American sailors looking at dials. “Minus 15 seconds” they say, and we see and explosion at zero. Buildings disintegrate. Destruction is “total and complete.” Shock waves are felt ten thousands miles away, and a mushroom cloud erupts. This is “an interesting case of inversion” according to Joanne Bernardi.

Another test is attempted from the air to explode ships at sea. The explosion is again on target, and “the kill is complete.”  But the narrator wonders, what has this “destruction done to mother earth?” “Can the human race continue to deliver these staggering blows without arousing somewhere in the depths of Earth a reaction, a counter attack, a horror still undreamed of? There are persons in the Japanese islands who believe that horror has already been seen.”

Then the scene changes to Japan and a village supported by mining where horror and uneasiness are in the air, illustrating the presumed product of atomic testing, but in this original section of the film, mining is the cause of the “horror,” not radiation.  The miners are going too deep in mine number 8, and conditions are becoming dangerous. The floor is creeping because there is too much pressure and two meters of water is rising there. We see dead men in the water, but they are nearly hacked to pieces, not drowned, slaughtered as if they had been attacked by an animal. Although they blame a colleague he had fought with, they can’t find the co-worker’s body. More are dead, and they don’t yet know why.

Then we see the giant insect. It’s an angry caterpillar that can’t be killed with ordinary bullets. They try military weapons, but walls collapse inside the mine due to an earthquake. The Earthquake Institute near the mine inspects the area of the volcano. The suggestion is that Rodan is a prehistoric insect that once roamed the earth. But Rodan transforms from a worm into a giant flying insect that can destroy planes: He is giant, fast, and carnivorous, and belongs to an extinct species whose eggs were hermetically sealed by the volcanic eruption until water from the mine tunnels reached the egg and insect larvae.  Rodan also has a mate. The two attack bridges and defend themselves against air attacks. To protect their community, humanity must destroy the pair with an erupting volcano and flames.

Although the film seems to provide only natural causes for the rise of Rodan, the drive for resources from mining serves as the catalyst for unsealing the egg and releasing the enormous insect from his grave. Instead of radiation, mining is the source of the “horror.”