Enviro-Toons

Review: Pike, Deidre M. Enviro-Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012.

Deidre M. Pike’s Enviro-Toons provides a broad overview of animated feature films and television shows with environmental themes.  After an engaging Preface and traditional introduction, chapter one of the work begins this exploration with a focus on selected Felix the Cat shorts. This chapter provides a brief historical overview of some of the early American animated shorts before discussing the origin of Felix the Cat during what the work calls “America’s Jazz Age.” To illustrate Felix as “a modern cat, born of new media, intended purely as entertainment,” the chapter includes plot summaries of several Felix the Cat shorts. The description of the first of these, Comicalamities (1928), highlights Felix’s thwarted attempts to win the heart of a female cat. Another summarizes Felix as a “Jazz Age” street musician in the animated short Oceantics (1930). The last of the summaries provide brief overviews of Felix Trifles with Time (1922), Felix Saves the Day (1922), and April Maze (1930). The chapter ends with a reiteration of Felix as a Jazz Age character eclipsed by Mickey Mouse once the sound era began.

Chapter two focuses on Bambi (1942) and provides a plot summary of the film and a comparison of the film to its novel source, Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods. After this lengthy plot summary that foregrounds the hyper-realistic construction of the animated forest creatures and their setting, the chapter attempts to contextualize the film in relation to a Bakhtinian readings of its possibility as an example of the epic genre. In the conclusion, Pike asserts, “Bambi operates as a narrative that centralizes power, concocting a portrait of transcendent natural order that can only be observed, appreciated, and obeyed. The viewer is not invited to engage—merely to accept or reject this film’s faulty syllogism: Nature is good. Humans are not Nature. Humans are not good.”

Chapter three highlights Homer as a comic hero in The Simpson’s Movie. The chapter first provides an introduction to the film’s context and its plot, peripherally connected to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. The chapter then includes a detailed summary of the film as both tragic and comic. According to the chapter, Homer Simpson is a comic hero who succeeds “only through sheer luck.” As if to substantiate this claim, the chapter concludes, “From a cool, multiple-voiced animation filled with laughter comes humility, responsibility and joy. That’s the message of The Simpson’s Movie—a laughter-filled epiphany, shared by the multiple voices of a community, and couched in the cool medium of ugly animation.”

Chapter four focuses on the television series Futurama as an ecofeminist cartoon sitcom. The chapter begins with a summary of the episode, “Into the Wild Green Yonder,” concluding “Futurama’s themes provide grist for ecological awareness and, at the same time, complicate a stereotypical environmental agenda.” Again drawing on Bakhtin, the chapter attempts to demonstrate that Futurama is a dialogic enviro-toon. The chapter then includes an extensive summary of the “Into the Wild Green Yonder” episode, with emphasis on the character Leela and her connection with the Ecofeminist Collective. In this chapter, there are nods to early ecofeminists such as Karen J. Warren and Carolyn Merchant, but the bulk of the work provides a lengthy overview of the episode, even ending with the final scene in the show. As the chapter states, “The ship’s recalcitrant robot Bender pops open a bottle, the label of which reads, ‘Old Fortran Malt Liquor.’ He shouts, “into the abyss, meatbags. Or not. Whatever.’”

In chapter five, “Farting Hybrids in South Park’s Rainforest,” the notion of the dialogic enviro-toon again becomes the focus. After a brief overview of the series’ origin and context, the bulk of the chapter summarizes a series of “green” episodes: the April 7, 1999 episode, “Rainforest, Schmainforest,” the March 29, 2006 episode, “Smug Alert,” and the April 26, 2006 episode, “ManBearPig.” Eventually the chapter emphasizes the dialogic character of these episodes, and of South Park in general. According to the chapter, “The carnivalesque discourse of South Park reminds us to laugh at ourselves, even when our cherished environmental values are the object of scathing satire.”

Chapter six offers an overview of Happy Feet (2006), with some comparison to The March of the Penguins (2005). As with other chapters in the work, this summary of Happy Feet highlights its epic qualities with the assertion that the plot of the film “moves forward like a Homeric poem, narrated in the booming preacher-like voice of Robin Williams’ Lovelace  character.” The chapter seeks to illustrate the ways in which the film lines up with Bakhtin’s description of the epic genre, as well. It also gives a nod to definitions of tragic narratives, suggesting, “despite its blissful ending, it exemplifies … tragic discourse.”

Chapter seven reads the animated feature WALL-E (2009) as both a tragic and comic narrative. The suggestion is that this dual approach helps the film “resist [ ] epic status.” And chapter eight examines Avatar (2009) from the perspective of the character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as a tragic hero, thus relegating the film to the status of monologic enviro-toon. Both of these brief chapters include some contextual information, but the bulk of each is devoted to summaries of the film’s plotlines.

Chapter nine explores selected films of Hayao Miyazaki through the lens of deep ecology. The chapter begins with an extended summary of the plot of Spirited Away (2002). Then it offers a brief overview of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononake (1999). After a short biography of Miyazaki, the rest of the chapter primarily summarizes in more detail both Nausicaa and Princess Mononake, with special attention given to the latter film. The chapter ends with the assertion, “The best advice, according to the deep ecology of Miyazaki, is to eschew hate and ‘go on planting your trees.’”

The final chapter serves as a conclusion to the work and seeks to explain the lenses broached in each of the short book’s chapters. Overall, the book may introduce readers to animated green media, such as television series and episodes through its plot summaries, but the most enlightening section of the text for this reviewer was the entertaining Preface. Here the text demonstrated how a multi-media approach might also line up with the more traditional Bakhtinian dialogism. The personal narrative approach reaches out to readers here, revealing the ramifications of what the author calls mediated environmentalism both for herself and her students. The last sentence of that Preface perhaps also broaches the rationale behind the media choices included in the text: they may provide ways to communicate environmental issues to a wide audience.