Happy Feet Two as Enviro-Toon

 

Happy Feet Two meets the criteria of the Enviro-Toon well. It shows us scenes of Ramon (Robin Williams) struggling to escape an oil spill and watch the spill flame up in a spectacular oil fire. It also explains The Mighty Sven’s (Hank Azaria) dilemma to introduce the film’s central conflict, the negative repercussions of global warming. Sven has lost his icy home to global warming. With warming temperatures, the ice melted, revealing open waters and green grasses that are uninhabitable to puffins. 

The Emperor Penguins face a similar plight when rising temperatures cause glaciers to break off or “calve,” isolating them in a large crevasse encircled by icy walls. Although the film suggests that the solution to this disaster is cooperation (working together to collapse a wall, so the penguins can relocate), the green patches showing through snow and ice tell a different story: climate change is stealing these penguins’ home. 

Unlike the original Happy Feet, humans’ attempts to help the penguins fail. Instead, penguins and their puffin friend are left alone to adapt to a changing landscape caused by humans. Despite the weak link additional characters like Bill and Will Krill (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt) provide, Happy Feet Two succeeds as an enviro-toon and an illustration of the everyday eco-disasters (externalities) associated with obtaining and overusing our resources to meet our basic needs.

Addressing Everyday Eco-Disasters in Happy Feet Two

 

 

For us, despite the film’s weaknesses, Happy Feet Two embraces a broader environmental message than that found in the original Happy Feet film. Happy Feet illustrates a clear eco-problem: overfishing. But the film offers a single unrealistic solution: human intervention to ensure sustainable fishing practices and protect penguins because they dance and sing like humans. 

Happy Feet Two, however, illustrates at least two devastating everyday eco-disasters caused by humans: oil spills and fires, and, more devastating for penguins and humans alike, global warming, both of which connect with humans’ exploitation of resources that meet their basic needs. 

With a more subtle approach to its message, Happy Feet Two looks more like a subtle enviro-toon than a didactic sermon. As Jaime Weinman argues, a model enviro-toon “never preaches.” Unlike cartoons with anthropomorphized animals or plant life alone, what Weinman calls “enviro-toons” not only humanize nature; they comment on abuse of nature and the natural, especially by humans. For us, enviro-toons are animated shorts or feature films that address environmental concerns and embrace an environmental message that responds to their historical and cultural contexts.

Illustrating Everyday Eco-Disasters in Film

 

Recent documentaries and feature films explore and argue against everyday eco-disasters. With explorations of films as diverse as Dead Ahead, a 1992 HBO dramatization of the Exxon Valdez disaster, Total Recall (1990), a science fiction feature film highlighting oxygen as a commodity, The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a comment on the fashion industry, and Food, Inc. (2009), a documentary interrogation of the food industry, our projects explore documentaries and feature films as film art to determine how successfully they fulfill their goals. 

We assert that whether or not the films we explore succeed as arguments against everyday eco-disasters and the negative environmental externalities they produce depend not only on the message the filmmakers convey but also, and most importantly, on the rhetorical strategies they employ. 

Happy Feet Two is a case in point. Even though most reviews of Happy Feet Two claim the film has subsumed the original film’s environmental critique of overfishing with an entertaining story of species interdependence, we see the film as a powerful critique of humans’ toxic contributions to climate change and water pollution in order to fulfill basic needs without the restraint necessary for sustainable development. 

 Lisa Schwarzbaum’s Entertainment Weekly review of the film argues, for example, that “Earnest messages about bad climate change and good parenting skills have been replaced by a we-all-share-a-planet sense of fun that's more Finding Nemo than National Geographic.” Manohla Dargis of The New York Times goes further, asserting that the film is merely “an amiable sequel with not much on its mind other than funny and creaky jokes, and waves of understated beauty.”

Negative Externalities and Fair Vs. Wise Use

 

Gasland (2010) documents multiple ways natural gas drilling causes negative externalities, threatening upper water supplies in the Delaware basin, for example. Documentaries highlight multiple types of negative environmental externalities: Genetically engineered seed has produced resistant super weeds, and carp introduced in the Chicago River are threatening other fish in Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes. Environmental externalities have a global effect negatively impacting water, air, housing, energy production, and quality of human and nonhuman life around the world. 

Instead of advocating for the fair use politics associated with the term externality, however, some documentaries and fictional films embrace sustainable development. A fair use model rests on conquest more than conservation. In “The Law of Increasing Returns,” for example, Bailey promotes a fair use model when he asserts, “It is in rich democratic capitalist countries that the air and water are becoming cleaner, forests are expanding, food is abundant, education is universal, and women's rights respected. Whatever slows down economic growth also slows down environmental improvement” (Salon.com). Unfettered economic growth, then, promotes environmental conservation, according to Bailey, so resources should be used as needed to advance economic development and, thus, environmental consciousness. 

Wise use and sustainable policies, on the other hand, disagree with Bailey’s premise. According to an article in Environment, “The Brundtland Commission’s brief definition of sustainable development as the `ability to make development sustainable—to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ is surely the standard definition when judged by its widespread use and frequency of citation” (Kates et al 10).