Alice in Wonderland and The Call for Separation

Alice in Wonderland demonstrates the need to separate the human world from the world of the imagination and, in so doing, argues for the separation of human and nonhuman nature. According to Deborah Ross, this bifurcation extends to the conflict between rational control and irrational imagination (54). In Alice in Wonderland, unlike The Adventures of Ichabod and Toad, the animal world is the treacherous and irrational world, and the human world is rational, peaceful and calm. The film opens on the human world, a pastoral scene with shade trees and a lake with swans where Alice, “a rosy-cheeked, ruby-lipped darling right off Mr. Disney’s drawing-board, a sister of Snow White, Cinderella, and all the fairy-tale princesses he has drawn” (Crowther “Disney’s Cartoon” 12) throws a garland of flowers down from her tree limb onto her governess. 

This secure space is disrupted when Alice and her kitten follow a talking rabbit into his rabbit hole, an animal world of imagination constructed as dangerous and frightening. On her journey, she encounters a beach where oysters are eaten by a carpenter, talking and singing flowers who deride her as a weed, an opium-smoking caterpillar who (as a butterfly) tells her about a magic mushroom, a Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter and Door Mouse and their unbirthday party.

That sense of danger culminates in Alice’s encounters in two settings: a mystic forest and an evil queen’s maze. In the mystical Tulgey Woods, Alice encounters walking eyeglasses, honky horn ducks, frog drums and cymbals, umbrella dodo birds, digging shovel birds, cage-bird finches, and a pencil bird that shows her a path until a broom dog sweeps it away: “If I get home I shall write a book about this place,” she says, and as she cries, the moon transforms into the Cheshire Cat, causing Alice to exclaim that she must leave this dangerous world: “I’m through with rabbits. I want to go home,” she says, and the cat opens a door in his tree and shows her the queen’s maze, the last of the dangerous settings Alice must traverse. The maze is a short cut, and she takes it to group of walking playing cards, who are painting roses. Alice is put on trial when the queen accuses her of lifting her skirt, but the animals, who had earlier confused Alice, help her escape. “Today is your unbirthday, too,” they tell the queen and roll out an unbirthday party.

Alice must use elements of the dangerous world to escape it. She eats part of the mushroom she saved in her pocket and grows so tall she must leave the courtroom immediately. Alice fights back with new stature but grows small again. She calls the queen a fat tyrant, and the queen yells, “Off with her head.” Alice runs through the maze with black and white cards chasing in an amazing effect. She passes each of the parts of her journey in Wonderland: the circle of birds on the shore, the tea party, the caterpillar, and the doorknob. 

In clear opposition to the novel from which the film was adapted and a reinforcement of the bifurcation between rational human and imaginative nonhuman worlds, Alice is saved, according to Ross, “not by facing [the cards] down with dawning maturity and confidence, like the ‘real’ Alice, but by waking up” (57). She sees herself asleep through the keyhole, and in a dream has a spiral effect and wakes up, reciting the caterpillar’s crocodile poem. The governess tells her to “come along. It’s time for tea,” and Alice goes willingly, glad to escape the danger of the animal world where walruses eat oysters presented as babies in bonnets, no matter how imaginatively constructed, for the safe human world in which she lives. Alice in Wonderland foregrounds the need to separate human and nonhuman nature, painting a negative picture of an animal world filled with terror and danger, without providing a space in which environmentalism and animal welfare can connect. 

The Advantures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) and Animal Rights Arguments

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad includes two distinctly different views, one of nonhuman and the other of human nature. The first narrative constructs nonhuman nature as ultimately good and kind in spite of villains thwarted by the heroes, but the second narrative constructs human nature as calculating and vindictive, with heroes demonstrating more weaknesses than strengths. This contrast is evident in the varying success of each. As A. W. asserts in his New York Timesreview, “the human figures in these adventures are stilted awkward creatures…. But in “Mr. Toad” [Disney] has limned a wondrously blithe bucko from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows” (18). 

The first narrative, the story of Toad, draws on The Wind in the Willows, a classic children’s book in which animal characters play distinctly human roles, highlighting Peter Singer’s claim that “All animals are equal” (1). This part of the film anthropomorphizes animals so much that their actions support Singer’s claim that “to avoid speciesism we must allow that beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life” (19). 

The second narrative retells The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in which the very human Ichabod Crane “loses his head” (at least figuratively) over a beautiful daughter of a rich farmer. Juxtaposing the two narratives highlights the separation between human and nonhuman nature foregrounded in both Bambiand Dumbo, this time clearly at the expense of the less valorized human nature.

Toad, the hero in The Wind in the Willows, is represented as a lighthearted and carefree aristocrat with a taste for new, again human, technology, so much so that he attempts to buy a car in exchange for his manor house. Toad is accused of stealing the car, is prosecuted and sent to prison but escapes to reclaim the deed to his home and, with the help of his friends Rat and Mole, prove his innocence. 

Toad and his friends are constructed as sympathetic human-like intelligent persons, but the weasels and their leader, Mr. Winky, represent more negative human qualities. When Toad escapes, the humane nature of his and his friends’ characters emerge. When they all learn Mr. Winky, a bartender who double-crossed Toad, is the leader of the gang that has the deed to Toad Hall, they agree to help him, “To prove your innocence we’ve got to get that paper away from Winky.” They succeed, but when he is exonerated, the narrator says Toad was reformed by New Year, but now he has a biplane and flies over Toad Hall! The likable Toad maintains his obsession with new technology, but he also represents how effectively he and his friends have been anthropomorphized as a way to draw on human sympathy. Even though Toad is depicted as a flawed character, none of his weaknesses harm others deliberately. The film only constructs the weasels in a negative light, clearly foregrounding the positive human-like qualities shared by all of these lovable animals. 

In the story of Ichabod Crane, on the other hand, the narrative highlights the negative human qualities shared by all the human characters in conflict throughout the tale. Ichabod and Bron Bones compete for Katrina’s hand in marriage. But Bron Bones wins Katrina by scaring Ichabod away first by telling stories of a headless horseman and then, presumably, by disguising himself as the horseman to literally chase Ichabod away. In this retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollowanimals play only a service role, as horses carrying the headless horseman and Ichabod. The human world is indeed separated from that of nature, even in the agricultural community in Sleepy Hollow. More importantly, the segment highlights a human world of sometimes-violent duplicity with little chance for redemption, a stark contrast to the delightful animal world of The Wind in the Willows.

Enviro-Toons?

Enviro-toons—animated shorts and feature films with ecology at their center—ask an audience to re-perceive everyday issues, themes, and knowledge related to differing phases of the American environmental movement: human ecology, organismic ecology, economic ecology, and chaotic ecology. The field of ecology, literally the study of homes, as its Greek root oikos (which translates as “household”) suggests, was named by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, in response to Charles Darwin’s work in evolutionary theory in the 1850s. According to Annette Kolodny, Haeckel’s notion of ecology as the study of homes served as the inspiration for the development of the field of human ecology.            

The human ecology movement grew out of the work of Chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, who translated Haeckel’s work from its original German and, according to Robert Clarke, introduced the concept of ecology in the United States. Richards defined human ecology as "the study of the surroundings of human beings in the effects they produce on the lives of men" (1910). Since she viewed humans as part of nature, she considered urban problems like air and water pollution as products of human activity imposed on the environment and, subsequently, best resolved by humans. The human ecology movement eventually evolved into home economics, but its grounding in conservation had lasting effects. A 1948 New York Times editorial, for example, endorsed a smoke abatement protest by “urg[ing] housewives and others to take this opportunity” to join the anti-pollution campaign. 

Organismic ecology is based on Frederic Clements’ view of a plant community as a living organism that evolves through succession. According to Clements, as a living organism, a plant community changes over time: “The unit of vegetation, the climax formation is an organic entity. As an organism, the formation arises, grows, matures, and dies…. The climax formation is the adult organism, the fully developed community” (Clements 124-25 qtd. in Merchant 182). This process of succession paralleled both the life cycle and the developmental history of the United States, with pioneer species invading ecosystems until climax communities of species were established: the deciduous forest climax, the prairie-plains climax, the mountain range climaxes of the Rocky Mountains, and the desert climaxes of the Southwest. A plant community is also vulnerable to disruption or death by technologies such as those that caused the Dust Bowl, however, when humans as pioneer species “had not appreciated or understood the grassland biome native to the Plains” (Merchant 184). 

The organismic school of ecology “rejected Social Darwinist assumptions of a nature characterized by Thomas Henry Huxley as ‘red in tooth and claw,’ for a nature of cooperation among individuals in animal and human communities” (Merchant 184). Warder C. Allee and Alfred E. Emerson, organismic ecologists at the University of Chicago after World War I, saw the workings of the natural world as a model for healing societal problems. Organismic ecologist Aldo Leopold, on the other hand, applied human ethics to the natural world, constructing a manifesto, “The Land Ethic,” which encouraged an ecologically centered view of the land as a biotic pyramid in which humans were a part. In Leopold’s view, humans had “the scientific and ethical tools to follow nature and heal it” (Merchant 185).

Whereas the organismic approach to ecology encouraged preservationist policies toward the environment; the economic approach, in which ecosystems were seen as sums of their parts, not living organisms, encouraged fair use politics that called for the exploitation of resources for human gain. Such an approach valorized humans as managers who were “above nature and able to control it” (Merchant 186) and use environmental resources for human benefit. Economic ecologist Kenneth Watt asserts, for example, that human beings are economic animals, and “economic ecology’s goal is to maximize the productivity of each type of ecosystem and each level of that ecosystem for human benefit” (qtd. in Merchant 188). Although ecologist Eugene Odum connected the tenets of organismic ecology with those of the economic to demonstrate ways humans can repair the natural world, the ultimate goal of economic ecology—maximizing benefits of nature for humans—serves as more of a disruption than a tool for healing. Human ecology, organismic ecology, and economic ecology, however, are all products of Haeckel’s development of ecology as a field in his 1866 work, Generelle Morphologie der Organsmen, and overlapped from at least the late 1910s forward. 

The last approach, chaotic ecology, did not emerge in its current form until the 1970s, when chaos theory was developed. Chaotic ecology views nature as a potential disruptor of its own ecosystems through natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, for example. Since both human and nonhuman nature disrupt nature, this theory suggests, then “both can work in partnership to restore it” (Merchant 190). Yet chaotic ecology’s premise that nature disrupts its own ecosystems also parallels an ancient view of the natural world as a powerful force that sometimes overwhelms human nature.

Although these four approaches are sometimes seen as linear phases, they are rooted in Haeckel’s definitions of ecology and continue to influence environmental policy. They also continue to influence media responses to nature and the natural world, at least in the world of the short or feature-length animated film. We assert, then, that American enviro-toons from the 1930s forward reveal three narrative and aesthetic patterns in relation to the historical and cultural context and approach to ecology underpinning them:

• the power of nature over the human world,
• the need for controlling human intervention and nurturing the natural world in order to strengthen their interdependence, and
• criticism of human exploitation of the natural world.

Ecocinema in the City Introduction

In Ecocinema in the City, we argue that urban ecocinema both reveals and critiques Price’s vision of urban environmentalism. Ecocinema in the Cityhighlights films that move beyond nature as “an antidote to cities and modern life” (Price 542) to reveal the complex and sometimes contradictory views of nature in the cities where we live. Urban ecocinema helps reveal how both human and nonhuman nature can interact sustainably and thrive. 

Routledge Book Site

Ecocinema in the City embraces the urban ecologies sometimes missing in the environmental movement, moving beyond a focus on “wildness” (Price 553). In both 20th and 21st century movies, however, nature and culture are typically bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and many times deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened.

This book project highlights the increasingly transformative power of nature in urban settings explored in film. Most urban nature films emphasize a toxic city like that of film noir. But others provide more positive perspectives on the natural world. Our organizational structure seeks to reveal the increasing importance nonhuman nature plays in urban settings. Nature’s restorative properties depend on humanities’ willingness to embrace both human and nonhuman nature. 

Although still drawing on toxic visions of the city, some films demonstrate the possibilities of narratives of environmental adaptation. Others go further and highlight interdependent relationships between humans and the natural world. 

A few urban nature films demonstrate a truly sustainable worldview, however, providing attainable solutions to environmental injustice and racism that combine conservation with preservation to, as Jenny Price declares, “take [] joy in wild nature…. [and] take[] joy in our everyday connections to nature” (553). Such a definition of environmentalism includes the city, for “It is an environmentalism, all told, in which our joy in wild nature is widely and deeply informed by the great joy of using nature well” (Price 553). This book project seeks to add to urban ecocinema scholarship by exploring four sections arranged to highlight the increasing importance nature performs in the city: Evolutionary Myths Under the City, Urban Eco-Trauma, Urban Nature and Interdependence, and The Sustainable City. The first two sections, “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” and “Urban Eco-Trauma,” take more traditional ecocinema approaches and emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space. 

Future Cities in Film Endnotes

End Notes

[1]This perspective on sustainable architecture stresses the need to conserve resources throughout the urban development process, avoiding the exploitation showcased in documentaries such as Sand Wars (2013). Written and directed by Denis Delestrac and released by Green Planet Films, Sand Warstravels around the globe to examine the vital issue of the exploitation of sand. While many of us think of beach erosion when we consider the vital nature of sand, Delestrac makes clear that the need for silica drives the world's construction industries and has led to the planet's reserves of sand being dangerously depleted.

[1]Such a green architectural vision is explored in earlier documentaries, as well. See for example, Sustainable Architecture (2004) begins by providing a history of resource use around the world. To move towards inefficiency, the documentary argues that we must plan better, decrease embodied energy use, decrease energy and resources used during construction, and take a holistic approach that is fair and equitable.

[1]Changing Nature (2005) also highlights repercussions and responses to climate change around the globe. In Morocco, for example, woman-centered organizations help stop forest depletion and encourage education, family planning, and sustainable farming techniques. Sustainable development and family planning are stressed as solutions to environmental problems in the Ukraine, Mexico, and Vietnam.

[1]See for example The Thaw (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), The Colony (2013), and Into the Storm (2014), and Noah (2014) as cli-fi films exploring climate change primarily outside urban areas. Day After Tomorrow, Half-Life(2008), and Godzilla (2014), however, do integrate the city in their discussions of climate change. 

[1]Like The Hunger Games, Elysium (2013) separates rich and powerful from the poor providing their resources, but in Elysiuma population explosion has created a global slum on earth, forcing the privileged to build their utopian city above ground in a sky city. The Congress (2013) offers utopian urban visions only in an animated world that drug-addicted residents create for themselves. In the non-animated “real” world, animated heroes are revealed to be homeless and despairing victims. Only those living in large airships above the slums below provide hope in this dystopic future. The Neo-Seoul segment of Cloud Atlas (2012) highlights technology and genetic engineering in a Vice City. The Zero Theorem (2013) offers a dystopian Terry Gilliam vision like that of Brazil (1985). 

[1]Big Hero 6 (2014) also suggests technology can address racial, economic, and, perhaps, environmental conflicts in a Disneyfied fictional and animated San Fransokyo.