Happy Feet Two: Enviro-toon?

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. Lisa Schwarzbaum’ 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review of the film argues, for example that “Earnest messages about bad climate change and good parenting skills have been replaced by a we-all-share-a-planet sense of fun that's more Finding Nemo than National Geographic.”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.”

For us, however, despite the film’s weaknesses, Happy Feet Two embraces a broader environmental message than the original 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 eco-disasters caused by humans: oil spills and fires, and, more devastating for penguins and humans alike, global warming.

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.

Happy Feet Two meets these criteria 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 Might 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), Happy Feet Two succeeds as an enviro-toon.

The genre of animation gains power because it challenges expectations of art, film, and narrative and offers “the greatest potential for expressing a variety of divergent points of view, while at the same time accommodating a dominant paradigm of established social meaning” (Wells Animation and America 13). Studios may resist or subvert the aesthetic and ideological orthodoxy associated with Disney, but they challenge aesthetic as well as ideological expectations through their negotiated resolutions between dominant and subversive views of social mores. As Wells suggests, a cartoon’s “very status as an animation asks an audience to re-perceive supposedly everyday issues, themes, knowledge” (6). With its emphasis on the consequences of global warming, Happy Feet II provides that lens of re-perception.

The Last Hunt: Then and Now

CNN reporter Kim Norgaard writes from South Africa on Nov. 15th that the illegal rhino horn trade has triggered an extinction threat to these animals in this large country. Norgaard reports that 340 of the Black species and the White species of rhinos have been killed in South Africa in 2011, exterminated for their horns, which are valued in Asia for their supposed aphrodisiac powers.

Norgaard reports that S. African game reserve administrators are hard pressed to stop the slaughter. Their numbers are small and the country is far too large and the organized poachers are well armed and rewarded by the high prices the rhino horns fetch on the black market. Money drives them to commit these crimes and poachers have already wiped out the Western Black rhino species, which recently has been declared to be officially extinct througout the world.

This relentless slaughter connects to the near elimination of the North American bison herds by the mid-1870's. Buffalo (bison) herds as large as 50 million existed in the 1850's, but after the successful completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 their numbers were dramatically reduced. There were less than 3,000 buffalo by 1875 when the hunting stopped, primarily because there was no money to be made in the destruction of the last of them.

Richard Brook's The Last Hunt (1956) starring Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger is based on the novel by Milton Lott of the same name. Charlie (Taylor) and Sandy (Granger) are brought to together by chance to try and hunt down the remaining buffalo. Charlie, a brutal, dangerous gunman, does it strictly for the killing, though the money plays a role. Sandy needs a new stake, but is sickened to his core by the years he has spent hunting the bison.

Both men are Civil War veterans unable or unwilling to escape the stench of death. Charlie is convinced that killing makes him a better man and that the war proved it and now killing buffalo does the same. And since each dead bison means more dead Indians, wiping out the herds means exterminating the Indian tribes which Charlie notes has been sanctioned with medals by the American government. Charlie kills animals with the same demeanor he has when he kills off a whole Indian family for running some of the hunting group's mules.

Sandy can barely pull the trigger anymore. The Last Hunt uses documentary footage of an actual buffalo thinning operation by US Park Rangers in the 1950's. We see numerous animals killed on screen. This footage is folded into the dramatic narrative reinforcing the brutality of such herd hunting. Sandy desperately attempts to maintain his sanity by changing his behavior. Charlie sinks deeper into paranoia and homicidal lunacy that has him hearing buffalo herds thundering in his ears and leads him to killing a valued co-worker. He then stalks Charlie during a vicious snowstorm which leaves him dead, huddled inside a fresh buffalo hide that has entombed him in solid ice.

The film's end is as bleak as the news from South Africa. There is a trail of bleaching bones and the surviving hunter is as broken as the littered landscape. He knows that the end of the buffalo is an end of a way of life and the horrible loss of a valuable portion of the ecosystem. And it seems that money will succeed in wiping out other animal species for similar reasons. The only difference is the 140 year time period between the bison and the rhino's elimination.

Rankin/Bass Studios, Nature, and the Supernatural: Where Technology Serves and Destroys

Rankin/Bass Studios, Nature, and the Supernatural: Where Technology Serves and Destroys

Unlike other animation studios, Rankin Bass, a pairing of Arthur Rankin, Jr.’s artistic ability and Jules Bass’s more business-conscious and practical understanding, produced stop-action animated shorts and features in which technological savvy was used to interrogate a variety of technological advances. In these films, technology is constructed as either a dream maker or a machine that disrupts a mythic natural garden. Although the studio is most well-known for producing a series of holiday iconic television specials, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, it also created at least four feature-length critiques of modernity, three in the 1960s, and the last, their only hand-drawn feature, in 1982. These four animated features draw on the combined, perhaps contrasting, strengths of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass. As Rankin explains, ”our intention was to combine his advertising know-how with my television and artistic know-how” (qtd. in Goldschmidt and Sykora). 

This pairing of opposites seems to coincide with the two conflicting themes prevalent in the few feature films produced by the partners. Two of the four Rankin/Bass animated features released by the studio—Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965) and Mad Monster Party? (1967)—demonstrate the force of technology but also illustrate ways it can be integrated effectively into the world of human and nonhuman nature when used for constructive rather than destructive purposes. The Daydreamer (1966) and The Last Unicorn (1982), on the other hand, argue against disrupting the garden (a literal Garden of Eden in The Day Dreamer) with knowledge and technology that overwhelm faith. Together, however, these four films all assert the need to guard against misuse of technology, science, and an epistemology that valorizes humans over nature. Mad Monster Party? most effectively advocates interdependence, however, since it offers hope that, when used effectively, artifacts of modern culture can serve both human and nonhuman nature.

Although based in science fiction rather than fact, Willy McBean and His Magic Machine uses animagic to illustrate the dangers of placing a technological wonder like a time machine into the wrong hands, those of a mad scientist who wants to write himself literally into history. With this time machine, Professor Von Rotten attempts to integrate himself into key moments in Western history: replacing Wild Bill in a Tombstone, Arizona gunfight, discovering America instead of Christopher Columbus, pulling King Arthur’s sword from the stone, building the pyramids, and discovering fire for cave dwellers. With help from the professor’s monkey, Pablo, however, Willy builds his own time machine and stops all of the professor’s attempts. Ultimately, he successfully controls technology in Willy McBean, so that history can be preserved and the balance between nature and culture can be maintained.

Mad Monster Party?, on the other hand, takes this critique further and anticipates and reacts to technological advances (the potential of nuclear weapons destroying humankind), illustrating one way to adapt to a changing landscape: destroy the monsters of humanity so that a “kinder” technology can prevail. In Mad Monster Party, technology is interrogated as both a dream maker and a machine that disrupts the garden. This stop action “animagic” film focuses on a mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, who has created the means to destroy matter. He declares, “Ha ha ha. Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.' I've done it. Created the means to destroy matter. They must all know. Know that I, Baron von Frankenstein, master of the secret of creation, have now mastered the secret of destruction,” so he invites his monster colleagues to celebrate his discovery.  

            With this premise in place, monsters from Dracula to the Invisible Man fight for Frankenstein’s formula. Frankenstein is retiring while “he’s on top” and turning over all of his secrets to his nephew, Felix, a young pharmacist. After Frankenstein saves his nephew by destroying himself, the other monsters, and his island, Felix floats off with Frankenstein’s assistant and his newfound love, Francesca. But the film ends with a twist. Francesca is “just a machine with hundreds of parts that will eventually wear out.” And by the film’s end, Felix also seems more like a machine than a human. The film, then, replaces the violent destruction of “monsters” like us with (apparently) peaceful android technology.

In The Daydreamer and The Last Unicorn, however, any machine in the garden disrupts its peace. These Rankin/Bass features—the first a mixture of live action and animagic, the second traditional cel-drawn animation—illustrate the danger of technological advancement and the knowledge on which it builds. Technology in these two features proves too destructive to facilitate, even in hands that are more “peaceful.” Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden describes America as a lush, unexplored “garden” that is in a tumultuous relationship with the “machine,” or social and technological advancements throughout American history. The “machine” overwhelms the “garden” and attempts to cultivate raw resources for consumption. Marx’s thesis, therefore, is that the “machine” alters the landscape in order to make it fit current measures of productivity. Both Daydreamer and The Last Unicorn reinforce this premise.

In The Last Unicorn, as in Daydreamer, the world of nature conflicts with the destructive technology-driven world of culture, even in the films’ fantasy settings. Yet, in a move that harks back to Leo Marx, as in Mad Monster Party?, interdependent relationships between humans and the natural world preserve the garden. The Last Unicorn must pair up with a wizard to free other unicorns and preserve the natural world they sustain. Chris, the Daydreamer, learns that the garden he seeks can only exist if nonhuman nature is preserved. These four films from Rankin/Bass Studios demonstrate the power of human-driven or supernatural technology as a force that destroys when placed in most humans’ hands. Only those willing to view the relationship between nature and culture as interdependent will save and maintain a “garden” that ultimately preserves us all, a garden preserved, perhaps, by a land ethic rooted in organismic approaches to ecology.

Ecology and Home in Environmental History and Film

Ecology and Home in Environmental History and Film

Ecology, literally, “the study of homes,” connects explicitly with our notions of shelter as a constructed space where humans live either with or without nature. This distinction between what is completely controlled, artificial, and “dead” and what is natural and alive springs from Empirical philosophy of the Eighteenth Century’s “Great Awakening,” a view that, according to Gary Lease, “led inevitably to an opposition between reason and nature, a position which Kant in his idealism effectively exploited” (8). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this struggle between a culture controlled by “reason,” and a nature seen as “irrational” became further complicated by a focus on scientific pursuit that seemed to eliminate Spinoza’s identification of nature with God. But, as Lease suggests, “After wrestling with the notion of nature for well over two thousand years, Western tradition had come up dry: neither an identification of the human species with nature nor a strict dichotomy between the two proved ultimately successful” (8, 9).

These dichotomies, or their deconstruction, are reflected in a variety of American fictional films.  Numerous films glamorize urban life and the culture it represents. Musicals such as Anchors Aweigh (1945), Easter Parade (1948), and On the Town (1949), and comedies including Sex in the City 1 and 2 (2008, 2010), Friends with Benefits (2011) and the remake of Arthur (2011) celebrate life in the city with little or no reference to the natural world. Numerous crime films and film noir titles reinforce the dark and corrupt underbelly of urban life, as well. Other films emphasize the need to connect further with the natural world, even bringing nature indoors as in Housekeeping (1987).  On the other hand, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a Depression era melodrama, explores the predicament of an elderly couple facing home foreclosure after the husband loses his job and is no longer able to pay the mortgage. They must live separately with family members, who mistreat them and misunderstand them. Unwilling to compromise, their children go back on their word and separate them permanently, forcing their mother to live in a nursing home and their father to live without her in California, on the opposite coast.

Many other American films reinforce the need to connect with the natural world, casting off the stifling emptiness of the city (or at least a tiny apartment with little closet space) for the life of the country. In Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (1948), for example, led by successful advertising executive and patriarch, Jim Blandings (Cary Grant), the Blandings leave their urban New York City apartment to refurbish a ramshackle house in the country, hoping for an ideal pastoral life but finding an expensive challenge. The film’s comedy facilitates a narrative that supports the ideals of the American dream without discounting the struggles required to achieve it.  Money Pit (1986) centers on this theme in a 1980s context with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in the leads. 

A Home of Our Own (1993) also replays the American dream, this time from the perspective of a single mother and her children in the 1960s. With the help of kindly neighbors and her hardworking kids, Frances Lacey (Kathy Bates) escapes the urban blight of Los Angeles and successfully provides a country home for her family, all built from scraps and dreams. These films demonstrate the power of shelter and place, highlighting a need to construct a home, either with or without nature.