Can Enviro-toons Change Perceptions of the Environment? Maybe Captain Planet Can

Enviro-toons, animated shorts and features with environmental messages, reflect the evolution of the environmental movement, with animated features from the 1990s forward providing illustrations of the most recent approach to ecology, chaotic—and conveying more blatant calls to environmental action like those found in the Captain Planet (1990) series. In Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), for example, chaos theory and, perhaps, chaotic approaches to ecology, are broached by the character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, a chaotician.

Although chaos theory and chaotic approaches to ecology are under dispute (see, for example, Klaus Rohde and Peter P. Rohde’s “Fuzzy Chaos…”), as the most recent approach to ecology, its appearance in a film from 1993 demonstrates the continuing impact of environmental history and the evolution of the environmental movement on the content of animated features.

Enviro-toons seem to have less effect on the environmental activist bent of their viewers, however. Although some audience members on both the “left” and the “right” called for a boycott of WALL-E merchandise to protest Disney’s hypocrisy in its critique of mega-corporations like itself, few viewers seemed to respond to the call. The WALL-Ewebsite sells its own merchandise, including figures, DVDs and games, but makes no reference at all to environmental concerns.

The Happy Feetwebsite does contain an “environmental” link, but it connects to a page where site users can create Happy Feetcards, not participate in environmentally conscious projects. Some audience members watching Happy Feet may have changed one behavior, however, and now encourage others to cut up six-pack rings. The Captain Planet Foundation, on the other hand, does promote environmental causes, with a Down to Earth Day festival for kids, grant money to fund hands-on educational projects, and programs to plant organic gardens and establish outdoor classrooms.

Primarily, however, animated features promote entertainment and consumption, not only of the films themselves, but also of the many products that accompany them. The content of animated features may be lauded by the Environmental Media Association, but the call to action is diluted by the ongoing call to buy.

Maintaining the Nature/Culture Binary in Disney’s Pocahontas (1995)

Maintaining the Nature/Culture Binary in Disney’s Pocahontas (1995)

Although early 1980s Disney films like The Fox and the Hound highlight the need to control human intervention and nurture the natural world in order to strengthen their interdependence, animated Disney features from the late 1980s and 1990s typically show us the power of nature and the supernatural over the human world, in a move that harks back to a more traditional vision of nature that rests on a powerful representation of nature and culture as binary oppositions. With the exception of Pocahontas (1995), these films sustain the conflict between humans and the natural world without critiquing the destructive force of humans’ exploitation of the natural world or encouraging interdependent relationships between the human and natural worlds. 

The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast (1992), Aladdin (1992), Mulan (1998), Tarzan (1999), Dinosaur(2000),  Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and Lilo and Stitch (2002) all highlight and maintain the opposition between nature and culture. By asserting the power of nature and/or the supernatural, these features minimize the costs of human exploitation and, in fact, suggest that, because they lack supernatural (or natural) force, humans bear no threat toward nature. Only Pocahontasillustrates the possible destructive force humans may wield against nature, but it too perpetuates the opposition between humanity and the natural world when John Smith leaves Pocahontas, her people, and, perhaps wild untamed nature behind. Although Captain Planet had a television presence in the 1990s, and Ted Turner further promoted the show’s environmental themes with the creation of an advocacy group, in films from the period, Disney perpetuates the nature/culture binary begun with Snow Whiteand cemented with Bambi. Disney’s 1990s’ perspectives merely maintain the binary while accommodating contemporary audiences.

Although it perpetuates racism, Pocahontas is a blatantly environmental film that contrasts British invaders with Native Americans who nurture the earth. John Smith works for Ratcliffe, a British imperialist, but immediately befriends Pocahontas, who chooses not to marry Kocoum, a brave Native American warrior, after talking to Grandmother Willow. John Smith’s friend, Thomas, kills Kocoum by accident to protect Smith, and a war seems inevitable, but Smith speaks with Pocahontas’s father, and Pocahontas falls on Smith’s body before they can kill him, telling them to choose life instead of death. Ratcliffe goes away in chains when his men decide to live in peace and take Smith home for medical help. Pocahontas stays behind in this version, and the ship turns into an illustration for a book as the film ends.

The film’s songs point out the environmental message of the film. In one song, Pocahontas sings, “You can own the earth and still / All you'll own is earth until / You can paint with all the colours of the wind.” The song suggests that it is as impossible to own the earth as it is to paint with the wind, a message that argues against exploiting the natural world. And in a song at the film’s climax, Native Americans sing in chorus,  “You think I'm an ignorant "savage" and you've been so many places; I guess it must be so, but still I cannot see if the savage one is me,” while the film shows the brutality of the British Imperialist Ratcliffe and his need to own and control Native Americans and their natural home.

But the film fails to resolve the conflict between Nature—as represented by Pocahontas, her people, and their world—and culture, as represented by Ratcliffe and the British soldiers sent to support his mission. In fact, the gap between the binary oppositions widens when Ratcliffe’s ship leaves with John Smith and his men aboard while Pocahontas watches from the shore. In Pocahontas, nature and culture clash so powerfully that they must remain separate, even though nature is idealized in the pristine state in which it is presented. This innocent nature proves so strong that it “chases” humans representing “culture” away. 

Bifurcating Nature and Culture in Over the Hedge

In both a perpetuation and critique of economic approaches to ecology, Over the Hedge argues that nonhuman nature must separate from humans and their suburban sprawl in order to survive, avoiding consequences of economic approaches to ecology. Over the Hedge is drawn from Michael Fry and T. Lewis’s comic strip of the same name. The comic strip explores suburbia from the perspective of the animals who lived there before the land was developed, attempt to save their forest from encroaching developers, but get distracted by the comforts of suburban life, from junk food to big screen televisions. Whereas the comic strip maintains the conflict between suburbia and woodland, highlighting the ambivalence woodland animals might have toward the wonders they find there, the film confronts the conflict between suburban luxury and wilderness life, offering a resolution that validates nonhuman nature over the artificiality of humans and their suburbs, again from the perspective of the forest animals.

Over the Hedge highlights the conflict between forest and suburb from its opening forward. The film’s protagonist, RJ (Bruce Willis), a junk food-eating raccoon, steals Vincent’s (Nick Nolte), a hibernating bear’s, wagon full of junk food, awakening the bear when he opens of can of potato chips. In the altercation that follows, the wagon falls off the cliff and is hit by a car, so Vincent is angry. He has lost his food because of RJ’s carelessness, so he gives him a week to collect the food and restore his stash.

This suburban scene contrasts with the first view of the forest where another hibernating animal awakens, a turtle named Verne who senses the melting snow and awakens other hibernating animals. The sleeping host of animals has eaten all the stored food during the winter and now must gather more to survive. Verne the turtle shows them the rest of the berries and gives one to each. Instead of living off a stashed load of junk food they must fill the log to the top with food in order to survive another winter, so they begin gathering food in their forest.

The overdevelopment of suburbia, however, begins to penetrate their forest Mecca, first because RJ has overheard Verne’s goal to fill the log and will offer an alternative survival plan that will ultimately repay the bear and save his life. Verne is surprised not only by the excess but also by its implications: half of their forest has been destroyed to build this new human neighborhood.

RJ is there to counteract Verne’s dismay, however, offering an alternative survival strategy that will lead them to “the good life” of nacho cheese and sugar. In the human suburb of over-consumption, they can gather their food in a week instead of the typical 237 days. Once they have tasted the junk food RJ offers, the other animals willingly join him, leaving Verne and his antiquated but more natural plan behind.

Suburbia, however, wants nothing to do with wild creatures. Gladys Sherp (Allison Janney), the president of the homeowners’ association, is especially dedicated to keeping the suburbs free of all nonhuman life. A montage sequence shows the animals stealing human food, but when they take a vanload of  pizza from Gladys, she calls a “verminator” (Thomas Haden Church), but since they all escape, the animals appoint RJ their new leader.

Verne, however, yearns for a more natural and safe life and returns the junk food, so the family can return to its normal healthy lifestyle in the forest. RJ and the other animals abandon Verne. RJ and his new family now embrace the suburban lifestyle. RJ must now replenish the bear’s stash in record time, however, so he coerces the family into a dangerous plan to gather a wagon full of junk food at a party thrown by their worst enemy, Gladys. RJ’s plan is ingenious and takes all of Gladys’s traps into account, but Gladys awakens and calls the verminator who captures all but RJ. RJ rolls away with the food, nearly condemning his forest family to death, but Vincent the bear tells RJ he has done a vicious thing: “you take the food and they take the fall,” so RJ is transformed and rescues the animals from the verminator and, with their help, fends off the bear.

Over the Hedge resolves with nature and culture bifurcated. Forest animals are better off in their forest, away from the dangers of suburbia. Glady’s verminator and the animals engage in a comic action scene that includes the capture of most of the woodland animals and their escape from both verminator and bear and ends in group harmony in a forest world separate from humans. That separation is best when animals form a community, a family that works together to fill a log, not with junk food but with nuts and berries. Unlike the comic strip, then, the film version of Over the Hedge erases ambiguity, leaving no room for interaction between suburbia and the forest beyond its hedgerow.

Reaching Toward Interdependence in The Fox and the Hound

The narrative of The Fox and the Hound reinforces the power of wild nature, even suggesting the limitations of domestic orthodoxy without, as in Bambi, condemning it as only a vicious enemy to the natural world. A hunting scene that opens the film suggests the need for a clear bifurcation between humans and nature, but the interactions between a fox cub and both a human and a domesticated hunting dog call that binary into question. Although contemporary and more recent reviews of the film seem ambivalent about the film’s valorization of nurture over nature and its revisions of domesticated and wild nature, we see the film as complicating Bambi’s message that wild nature and domesticated culture of humans must remain separate in order to survive.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times argues, for example, that The Fox and the Hound “breaks no ground whatsoever” (“Old Style Disney”). Roger Ebert agrees that The Fox and the Hound “looks like a traditional production from Walt Disney animators” (“The Fox”). Yet, according to Ebert, “for all of its familiar qualities, this movie marks something of a departure for the Disney studio…. It’s not just cute animals and frightening adventures and a happy ending; it’s also a rather thoughtful meditation on how society determines our behavior.” The mixed feelings Ebert asserts are reinforced by a later reading by Leonard Maltin, but they all marvel at the hyper-realistic vision of nature like that highlighted in Bambi opening The Fox and the Hound. 

The conflict between human and nonhuman nature is established when a dog’s bark enters the scene, and gunshots explode. A fox is hit, but its cub survives to help blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman nature with help from a friendly widow who adopts him. The binary between wild and domesticated nature, however, is also reinforced in the same scene, since as the widow rescues the fox pup, a hunter who lives next door brings a hunting dog pup named Copper to Chief the elder hound dog, so he can teach him his hunting strategies. Ultimately they force the widow to release Tod in a nearby nature preserve.

The boundaries between domestic and wild nature are blurred, however, when Tod and Copper interconnect and form an interdependent relationship that saves them both when a bear attacks Copper on a hunting trip. Now Copper and Tod may live in separate spaces, but they share an alliance. The next year the caterpillar has turned into a butterfly, demonstrating how any creature can change, including the violent and angry hunter. Because a fox named Tod saved him and his hunting dog, Copper, Amos rejects his former hatred of wild nature and builds an alliance with the widow, the bridge between domestic and wild nature. Copper sleeps and dreams of Tod, while Tod and Vixey, his fox mate, watch the house from their hill, separated in their nature preserve without the overwhelming fear of human nature reinforced in Bambi.