Goofy Gophers and the Lumberjerks: An Enviro-toon for Earth Day 2015

The 1955 Warner Bros.’ cartoon, Goofy Gophers in Lumber Jerks, ends with a line from one of the gophers that illustrates the 1950s lifestyle: “Isn’t our house much better than it was before?” he asks his partner as he looks up at a “tree” built of furniture sawed from what had once been their tree home. A television set tops off this house of furniture that stands alone among the stumps—what is left of a forest clear-cut for its lumber. The gophers seem happy with their new home—merely commenting “it will be better when we have electricity.” But after seeing the consequences of “progress” as depicted in the cartoon, devastation of our forests, are we meant to answer “yes” to the gopher’s question? Does the cartoon argue that “our house [is] much better than it was before?”

With this parting question, Goofy Gophers and the Lumber Jerks becomes a model enviro-toon. As Jaime Weinman explains, it “never preaches . . . . And instead of showing that only evil people harm the environment, it shows that trees are being chopped down in order to make the things we use every day—in other words, we are the ones harming the environment.” Lumber Jerks seems to emanate from an attitude in 1950s America that Klein calls “Consumer Cubism” (210), “an obsession with the efficient, angular plan.” The faster a consumer could gain access to goods, the better. Klein claims “individualism and democracy were being redefined in terms of consumer desire. The homogeneous surface, open and ‘free,’ came to stand in for America’s imperium” (210). These attitudes were reflected in both narrative and aesthetics of cartoons after 1954.

Lumber Jerks moves viewers gradually to this environmentalist, anti-consumerism message. It first focuses on saving one tree in a forest—but the conclusion differs dramatically. Two cheerful gophers scurry toward their home tree, but when they go up into the hollow of the tree, they find it has been cut down and carried away. The two gophers take steps to retrieve their tree—what they call their property—tracking it to a river and then picking it out of the hundreds of logs floating on the water. They climb on their tree and row away but cannot fight the current and nearly go over a waterfall. Once they escape, one gopher exclaims, “I’m bushed,” and the two fall asleep, waking up only after entering a lumber mill, surviving a saw blade cutting their tree trunk in two. 

After seeing the devastation around them, the gophers state the obvious about the repercussions of consumerism. One of the gophers explains, “It looks like they are bent on the destruction of our forests,” and the scene shifts to the mill’s workings. One “shot” shows trees ground into sawdust being made into artificial fireplace logs. Another shows an entire tree being “sharpened” to produce one toothpick. Then the gophers discover what had happened to their own tree: “They’re going to make furniture out of our tree,” states one. But the idea of ownership of consumer goods extends to the gophers and their tree home. They wish to reclaim their property, their own possession, so the other gopher exclaims, “That is definitely our property. We must think of a way to repossess it.” The gophers siphon the gas out of the furniture truck and, when it breaks down, “steal” their tree’s furniture from the truck. They build a tree house with the furniture, adding branches for good measure and topping the tree off with a television set. 

The cartoon ends with one of the gophers telling the other, “Isn’t our home much better than it was before ….[we have] Television… and just think how much better it will be with electricity!” Because the gophers view their tree home as a possession not unlike the furniture produced from its wood, they seem pleased with their “repossession.” But the enviro-toon leaves viewers feeling ambivalent about the price of progress.

Lumber Jerks combines a critique of consumerism with a statement about its source—natural wilderness—but seems to also endorse interdependence between humans and the natural world (and between progress and conservation), at least to the extent that furniture built from a tree trunk can return to the forest as the Goofy Gophers’ home. With its overt focus on consumerism, however, the ‘toon goes further than the other shorts we examined here. It leaves viewers questioning the Goofy Gopher’s conclusion stated in the opening: “Isn’t our house much better than it was before?”

Enviro-toons and Environmental History: Crossing Studios, Crossing Approaches to Ecology

Enviro-toons and Environmental History: Crossing Studios, Crossing Approaches to Ecology

The genre of animation (and animated shorts) gains power because it challenges expectations of art, film, and narrative. The best animated films “offer 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. The following brief analysis discusses representative animated shorts and demonstrates the often subtle but nonetheless powerful ecological messages conveyed within them from this period. Keeping in mind that the historical and cultural contexts in which these cartoons were produced vary, we argue that ultimately, beliefs about technology, consumerism, and the natural are reflected in, and sometimes critiqued by, enviro-toons. 

Of the enviro-toons we viewed, most demonstrate the power of nature over the human world. These more traditional cartoons seem to be a by-product of the ongoing conflict between “the machine and the natural” (Klein 79). Industrialization widened the gap between nature and culture, between humans and the natural world. Nature, then, was seen as either a resource to be exploited or an “enemy” to be controlled.  Some early Felix the Cat cartoons foreground this reemphasized nature/culture binary when they show how stormy weather can spoil a picnic (April Maze (1930). April Maze seems to anticipate New Deal programs that saw nature as a powerful force needing both respect and taming. Tennessee Valley Authority projects, for example, promoted a system of dams to control flooding on big rivers—and to bring electricity to the rural poor. Michael Barrier explains that Otto Messmer, the cartoon’s director, “never let his audience forget that Felix was as artificial as his environment” (Hollywood Cartoons 45), but in April Maze, nature is effectively portrayed as a powerful force that the more human-like Felix cannot conquer. 

Cartoons from the 1940s, too, reflected this conflict between humans and the natural world. Perhaps as a reaction to World War II, however, superheroes like Superman fought natural elements and won. Norman Klein concurs, suggesting that the world war had just as much of an impact on cartoons as did Hollywood movies like film noir and screwball comedies (183). The Superman series from this period seems to reflect this impact most visibly. They also exaggerate the machina versatilis, ”updat[ing] an old theme of theirs, the film screen as machine” (Klein 86). According to Klein, “The entire screen seems to be made of steel, like a machine housed in black, corrugated metal, with gray canyons beneath skyscrapers, and diabolical machines instead of ghouls” (86). In this mechanized context, the cartoons place Superman as superior to elements in the natural world. In the opening to most of the cartoons, Superman masters lightning and other elements like those in April Maze. And in Volcano (1942) Superman stops a volcanic eruption to save Lois Lane and the town below. Superman always comes out victorious, an argument in favor of the Allies’ own victory over the Germans. The war provided the industrial background of a Modernist world in which technologies (and humans) triumph over nature.

Several Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s highlight this sustained conflict between humans (or anthropomorphized animal figures) and the natural world, unsurprising coming from this more conservative studio. Flowers and Trees(1932) foregrounds idyllic nature’s triumph over an evil anthropomorphized tree stump. As the first color short from Disney, Flowers and Trees won an Academy Award with its Technicolor dancing trees and flowers, romantic tree love story, and jealousy. But the tree stump’s jealous rage is thwarted by birds, which literally put out his fire. The tree stump clearly represents the evil human world, since his tongue is a snake and his goal is to destroy the tree lovers and their forest. In the end, the stump destroys himself and reinforces his non-flora status, since vultures encircle his corpse.

Four Disney cartoons that feature Donald Duck and Chip an’ Dale highlight the power of nature over the human world—or at least the human-like world of Donald Duck, all in relation to the chipmunks saving their nuts: Chip an’ Dale (1947), Out on a Limb (1950), Out of Scale (1951), and Dragon Around (1954). This approach to ecology continues in feature length films from Disney and other studios, from Alice in Wonderland (1951) to The Daydreamer (1966), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh(1977), The Little Mermaid (1989), and Lilo and Stitch (2002). All of these cartoons emphasize the power of nature over the human (or anthropomorphized animal) world and suggest that economic approaches to ecology blossomed during this pre- and post-World War II industrial era and continued into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Where Life Begins: Documenting the Arctic as Home

Where Life Begins: Documenting the Arctic as Home

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

Recent Arctic environmental documentaries such as James Balog’s Academy Award nominated Chasing Ice (2012) and geologist Simon Lamb’s Thin Ice  (2013) show audiences the Arctic as a blank space important primarily because its changing ice serves as evidence of climate change. Although these films may provide compelling images, for us, documentaries counteracting this Arctic mythology by highlighting Arctic indigenous cultures provide much more effective assertions against policies that destroy the environment. Being Caribou (2005), Vanishing Point (2012), and The Sacred Place Where Life Begins: Gwich’in Women Speak (2013) argue powerfully and convincingly against environmental exploitation by bringing indigenous viewpoints and voices to the fore.

Directed by and starring two white Canadians, Being Caribou seems to merely frame its arguments against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with indigenous voices. In Being Caribou, Leanne Allison films her and husband Karsten Heuer’s journey behind a herd of 120,000 caribou to and from the Refuge in Alaska. The conclusion of the film, however, inserts the voices and perspectives of the Gwich’in whose lives depend on the caribou. After a disappointing response from Congress when they share the film, Heuer searches for ways to “make the story of these caribou resonate” and concludes “maybe the answer is to work from the bottom up and not just from the top down.” Shots of Gwich’in Indians protesting the Refuge oil drilling illustrate what this change might mean, and their Gwich’in host Randall Tetlichi’s voice ends the film: respect all life, “plant life, animal life,

bird life,” and, most importantly, the caribou.

Narrated by Greenland Polar Eskimo Navarana K'Avigak, Vanishing Point contrasts the worlds of Greenland Arctic indigenous populations from those of her ancestor Shaman’s Canadian Inuits on Baffin Island. In Vanishing Point, the Arctic is alive with both nonhuman and human life, but Navarana’s way of life is threatened by innovations from the “South” and human-caused climate change causing “the world [to] melt under our feet.” In Greenland, “the ice is different from how it used to be,” but the methods of survival exclude gasoline-powered snowmobiles and boats, choosing instead to use sled dogs and kayaks. Canada’s Inuit, on the other hand, eat “Southern” sugar and drive gasoline-powered vehicles. Ultimately, Navarana chooses her Greenlander way, not because “it’s tradition or looks pretty” but because it just makes sense. It conserves the lives they know and love.

The Sacred Place Where Life Begins gives Gwich’in women activists a space in which to condemn oil drilling in the Refuge and advocate for the caribou. As multiple Gwich’in women explain, they have been caribou people for thousands of years, and their lives and culture depend on the caribou. Oil drilling will disturb the caribou life cycle and disrupt their migration. To amplify this point, the film draws on a history of oil spills and species annihilation. All three of these films make powerful arguments for environmental conservation because they give voice to Arctic peoples. The Arctic is not a desolate end of the world but a home.