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review of the film argues, for example that “Earnest messages about bad climate change and good parenting skills have been replaced by a we-all-share-a-planet sense of fun that's more Finding Nemo than National Geographic.”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