The Incredible Mr. Limpet and Interdependence

The Incredible Mr. Limpet reinforces interdependent relationships between live action and animation, since in the film an animated fish, Henry Limpet (Don Knotts) helps the live action 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.

As an adaptation of a Theodore Pratt novel of the same name, “One of the strangest films ever made that didn’t involve David Lynch” (Null) opens with a Navy message of approval. The film is framed by a scene in the film’s present that demonstrates Henry Limpet’s continuing value as a connection between human and nonhuman nature. Navy sailors march to an office that says “Top Secret.” Something was locked in a file back in 1945, and it was hoped they would not need to open it. But porpoises have brain cavities greater than man’s and they think “he’s” teaching them.

The reason behind the top secret designation is revealed when the Navy officers open a file that begins in September 1941. “That’s when it first started,” the officer, Adm. P.P. Spewter (Larry Keating) explains, “I never knew him before,” and the film flashes back to 1941 where a still-human Henry is working as a bookkeeper in Brooklyn at the Atlantic and Gulf Line Shipping Office. His eyesight prevented him from joining the Navy, but his connection with water and fish is clear, since he has a fish bowl on his desk and fish in the water cooler to take home with him in a jar with holes in the lid because, Henry exclaims, “Fish are so bright and cheerful. So beautiful.” He even has a popular guide to science window blind at home that describes different eras, including the Devonian era. “Our ancestors were fish,” Henry says. He even sees fish as the salvation for this violent planet: “Hope in the war of Europe comes from thinking of fish turning into men, so they might turn out even better.” 

Limpet wishes he were a fish, but his wife, Bessie, and friend and rival for his wife’s love, George, want him to give them up, get rid of his fish tank and go to Coney Island instead of a lecture on the mating habits of shellfish. Yet on their way to Coney Island, Limpet’s service to the Navy as a source of an interconnected relationship between human and nonhuman nature is foreshadowed when a newspaper headline on the train reads, “Nazi subs infest waters.” And, when they arrive, Limpet sits on the boardwalk and talks to the fish below, explaining that he has read the Theory of Reverse Evolution by Radcliff and hopes he can devolve just as Radcliff explained it: “More than anything I wish I could be one of you right now. I wish, I wish, I was a fish,” he says, and jumps in. 

Now the underwater scene is animated, and before our eyes, Limpet changes into an animated fish with glasses, connecting live action and animation, as well as human and nonhuman nature. He fits this aquatic role more than he ever fit in as a human. Bessie keeps saying, “He doesn’t know how to swim.” But he does, even swimming up to George who just sees a fish. “Bessie. What’s going to happen to poor Bessie, George?” Limpet asks, but George doesn’t hear him. “I saw a fish wearing his glasses,” George tells Bessie and takes Bessie home. 

The animation from here on effectively ties Limpet’s character to the sea, and human characters to cities and ships. The film fluidly integrates animation in the primarily live-action film with the help of animators from Disney. According to Ben Simon, “the animation director is none other than Bill Tytla, who created and executed the magnificent Night On Bald Mountain sequence for Fantasia. Simon explains that “other directorial tasks [were] undertaken by famed Warner Brothers director Robert McKimson.” He also asserts that “an uncredited Art Babbit (who brought Fantasia’s Chinese Mushrooms to life, and is mostly responsible for the evolution of Goofy’s character) was an animation contributor to the film.” Other Disney artists contributed to the animation sequences. 

The film moves beyond bifurcating animation and live-action, however, and demonstrates contrasts between human and nonhuman nature when Limpet literally swims away from the human world. As a way to highlight his difference from humans as an animated fish, the further Limpet swims, the more assimilated he becomes. Even colors become more brilliant, for Limpet, and he discovers he has a powerful roar or “thrumb” that becomes an effective secret weapon against the Nazis. By scouting U-Boats and thrumbing to highlight their location, Limpet tells the Navy when to drop charges and destroy the subs. 

In The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Limpet helps make a better world by reversing evolution, a valorization of the more peaceful life of fish. But that reversal allows him to move human and nonhuman nature closer toward an effective interdependent relationship in which Limpit’s thrumb can help win a war and his knowledge can educate porpoises to serve the Navy, possibilities only imaginable in animated portions of a fictional film but illustrations of an effective way to bridge the gap between human culture and the natural world, a bridge that may draw on organismic approaches to ecology. 

Orthodox Nature in Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Whereas studios like UPA and Rankin/Bass embraced modernism, thematically, aesthetically, or both, Disney Studios maintained its conflict with modernism, even while engaging the technology of the modern age. Steven Watts described Walt Disney as “a sentimental modernist” (87). Although he experimented “with the forms and techniques” of modernist art, “[h]is true aesthetic heart… continued to beat to an internal rhythm of nineteenth-century sentimental realism,” a realism Watts equates with the Victorian age. According to Watts, “modernism emerged in direct opposition to the principles and sensibilities of nineteenth-century Victorianism,” seeking to reconcile dichotomies perpetuated by Victorianism: “human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious” (87). Disney both embraced and resisted this modernist move, blurring boundaries based on the separation of reality and fantasy in his aesthetic while valorizing Victorian binaries that perpetuated a bourgeois status quo. Disney counters a sometimes modernist aesthetic with “flourishes of sentiment and naturalism” (Watts 92) in many of his films, highlighting an orthodox domesticity that conflicts with modernist ideals.

Adherence to “orthodoxy” continued in most of the Disney films from the 1960s forward, but in several films both before and after Walt Disney’s death, Disney blurs boundaries between “human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious.” Because of such blurring, the binary between human and nonhuman nature breaks down, and borders become more permeable while still adhering to the ideas of sentimental populism Watts describes. According to Watts, Disney “carried into adulthood an ideology—like his aesthetics, it was instinctive and emotional rather than systematic and articulate—that glorified ordinary Americans, blended democratic sympathies and cultural conservatism, and flowered from the roots in his rural, Midwestern background” (96).

In Sleeping Beauty (1959), for example, the Russian ballet is transformed into a fairy tale story like Snow White and Cinderella in which domestic bliss is achieved with the help of woodland creatures like birds and rabbits. Aurora (the Princess in Sleeping Beauty) and nature are one in a rural cottage and meadows where she hides from an evil curse. As Aurora sings, an owl dons a prince’s cape to dance with her, and birds hold up the sleeves as they join in. All the animals support her in the meadow. And the three fairies who save her each represent a natural element. 

Here nature and the supernatural are one, with Maleficent, the evil fairy who cast the spell to place Aurora into an eternal sleep, turning a forest into a briar patch that looks as mean as she is. She even turns into a dragon to fight Prince Philip and keep him from kissing and awakening Aurora. The two sides of nature reside in the two extremes of supernatural, but the “good” side wins, and domestic bliss is restored. In Sleeping Beautydomesticity is seen as a force as natural as the creatures that help Aurora attain her dream of marriage to a prince and a happily ever after ending.

The Secret of NIMH (1982) and Animal Rights

Disney films from the 1940s and 1950s that grapple with animal treatment may range from those advocating animal rights, sometimes at the expense of other species, to those that rest on a biosocial moral paradigm that provides a space for interdependence in service to the community. But they all demonstrate that the animal rights/animal welfare debate was well under way before Peter Singer’s animal liberation movement gained force. These films also served as grounding for films with more explicit animal rights messages. 

These Disney films lay the groundwork for a later film with a more explicitly forceful animal-rights message like that found in The Secret of NIMH (1982). The film is the first feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney Studios to join an independent animation team, a connection that aligns the film further with the earlier Disney animated features. According to Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times, The Secret of NIMH  "is an attempt to return to the rich, fully detailed animation that is known as ‘classic’ Disney animation” (C17), a goal that, according to Roger Ebert, Don Bluth and his team successfully executed. Ebert asserts regarding the film: “they have succeeded in reproducing the marvelous detail and depth of the Disney classics. This is a good-looking, interesting movie that creates a little rodent world right under the noses of the indifferent local humans“ (“The Secret”).

Ebert also likes the film’s premise: In a seemingly direct reaction to both Disney and Singer’s text, the film argues vehemently against animal testing and experimentation and, according to Ebert, asks the question: “What if a group of laboratory animals were injected with an experimental drug that made them as intelligent as humans?” (“The Secret”). As Nicodemus, the rat narrator, reveals, scientists from NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, captured and performed dangerous experiments on mice and rats that ultimately increased their intelligence. Nicodemus explains the plight of the rat community to Mrs. Brisby, a mouse who comes to the rats for help, telling her that her husband, Jonathan “made possible the rats’ escape from the terrible … NIMH.” 

Jonathan’s matronly wife, Mrs. Brisby, helps them outsmart human farmers and the NIMH Institute, ensuring a move to Thorn Valley away from the bulldozers meant to destroy them. In The Secret of NIMHthe rights of animals overshadow those of humans, not only because human characters serve only minor roles in the film but also because humans mistreat animals both in the laboratories of NIMH and on the farm. The Secret of NIMH, then, explicitly argues against cruel mistreatment of animals both in laboratories and in “the field,” while demonstrating that animals deserve rights because they so resemble us. Together these films also paved the way for environmentally conscious animal welfare films like Bee Movie. For us they also highlight that the roots of both the environmental and animal rights movements were well in place before either Singer’s animal liberation or the contemporary environmental movement.

Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Animal Welfare

Lady and the Tramp connects human and nonhuman nature by focusing on domesticated dogs. Although dogs are “imprisoned” by dogcatchers and a visiting aunt, ultimately they are on equal ground with their human owners in a relationship like that described by Mary Midgley’s and Hume’s ethical theories. According to Bosley Crowther’s New York Timesreview, “the various types of canines that are burlesqued in human terms are amusing—if you like canines endowed with the mannerisms of human beings” (“Disney’s Lady” 17). Although Crowther asserts that “Mr. Disney’s affection for dogs is more sugary than his appreciation of mice and ducks,” but their representation highlights an interconnection between animal welfare and environmentalism. 

Dogs are at the center of the film from its opening forward. The film opens with a dedication to dogs that shows us how loved and appreciated dogs can be in a small town at Christmas. The focus is on one house and family with a puppy in a laundry basket in the spotlight. We do not see the humans’ faces, only the pup, Lady. Lady’s space is opulent, and she is valued as a member of the family, even moving into their bed. When Lady is an adult, the interdependent relationship between herself and Jim and Darling continues; she still sleeps in her owners’ bed and gets Jim his slippers. She catches the newspaper and takes it in the house. Jim and Darling feed her doughnuts and coffee and give her a license on a collar at six months. Lady shares her equal footing in the human world with other dogs, as well: a Scottie dog named Jock, and a hound dog named Trusty, who dreams of tracking animals through a swamp. With a collar, Lady is now full grown—with a “badge of faith and respectability.” She runs to “Jim Dear” when he whistles and holds a treat on her nose while up on hind legs. She is happy on the carpet between her two human companions.

Tramp, on the other hand, is a carefree bachelor mutt living in a barrel at a train station, but he also shares an interconnected relationship with humans, even though he lives on the street, begging meals from chefs at Tony’s Restaurant. But Tramp also helps keep dogs free from exploitation, so when a dog pound wagon goes by and the driver posts a sign about unlicensed dogs being confiscated, he sets two dogs in the wagon free and distracts the dogcatcher by leading him away from the other dogs and to “snob hill” where he overhears Lady’s complaints about her owners: “Jim Dear and Darling are acting so” strange she says, so she feels less like a family member.We see the scenes of Lady’s mistreatment in flashback: Jim tells Lady to get down instead of giving her the usual treat. He calls her “that dog.” Darling knits in a rocking chair and says “no” when Lady brings her the leash to walk her. Darling will not play ball and gets angry when Lady picks up yarn. After hearing about these changes, Trusty and Jock tell her about the coming present—a baby. Tramp walks by while they explain, and he tells her about some of the bad consequences of a new baby. It seems that the biotic relationship will be shattered. When a baby moves in, a dog moves out. Then we see a montage of scenes that prove he is right—baby shower, birth, Lady forgotten and ignored, predictions that seem real when her owners leave her with Aunt Sarah and her two conniving Siamese Cats. 

Aunt Sarah blames Lady for her cats’ misbehavior and punishes her, seemingly negating the biotic community established earlier in the film. When Sarah decides to muzzle Lady, she runs away, escaping feral dogs with Tramp’s help, free until a dogcatcher captures her. The aunt further breaks up the biotic community Jim and Darling seemed to build with Lady when she takes her home from the pound and chains her to a doghouse in the back yard. Jock and Trusty want to help her by marrying her. They have comfortable homes where she would be welcome. Tramp comes in with a bone, and they turn their backs on him, blaming him for Lady’s plight. She is upset about the dog pound, but a storm comes in, and a rat is in the woodpile and heading toward the baby. By thwarting the rat, Lady and Tramp prove their dedication to humans and again gain access to their world, in spite of the Aunt’s vile treatment of them. 

Lady’s owners’ return reignites the biotic relationship between humans and at least domesticated animals in the film. When Darling and Jim come home, they see the dogcatcher taking Tramp away and think Tramp attacked their baby. But Lady shows them the now dead rat. Jim sees it, and the other dogs save Tramp from the dogcatcher, leaving Trusty with a broken leg. Lady and Tramp have four puppies by the next Christmas with the baby looking on. And Jock and Trusty comes to Lady’s house for breakfast. Trusty tells stories from grandfather “old Reliable” to Lady and Tramp’s pups and the story ends, with the human and animal worlds interconnected, at least in this domestic realm.

191955