Enviro-Toons

Review: Pike, Deidre M. Enviro-Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012.

Deidre M. Pike’s Enviro-Toons provides a broad overview of animated feature films and television shows with environmental themes.  After an engaging Preface and traditional introduction, chapter one of the work begins this exploration with a focus on selected Felix the Cat shorts. This chapter provides a brief historical overview of some of the early American animated shorts before discussing the origin of Felix the Cat during what the work calls “America’s Jazz Age.” To illustrate Felix as “a modern cat, born of new media, intended purely as entertainment,” the chapter includes plot summaries of several Felix the Cat shorts. The description of the first of these, Comicalamities (1928), highlights Felix’s thwarted attempts to win the heart of a female cat. Another summarizes Felix as a “Jazz Age” street musician in the animated short Oceantics (1930). The last of the summaries provide brief overviews of Felix Trifles with Time (1922), Felix Saves the Day (1922), and April Maze (1930). The chapter ends with a reiteration of Felix as a Jazz Age character eclipsed by Mickey Mouse once the sound era began.

Chapter two focuses on Bambi (1942) and provides a plot summary of the film and a comparison of the film to its novel source, Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods. After this lengthy plot summary that foregrounds the hyper-realistic construction of the animated forest creatures and their setting, the chapter attempts to contextualize the film in relation to a Bakhtinian readings of its possibility as an example of the epic genre. In the conclusion, Pike asserts, “Bambi operates as a narrative that centralizes power, concocting a portrait of transcendent natural order that can only be observed, appreciated, and obeyed. The viewer is not invited to engage—merely to accept or reject this film’s faulty syllogism: Nature is good. Humans are not Nature. Humans are not good.”

Chapter three highlights Homer as a comic hero in The Simpson’s Movie. The chapter first provides an introduction to the film’s context and its plot, peripherally connected to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. The chapter then includes a detailed summary of the film as both tragic and comic. According to the chapter, Homer Simpson is a comic hero who succeeds “only through sheer luck.” As if to substantiate this claim, the chapter concludes, “From a cool, multiple-voiced animation filled with laughter comes humility, responsibility and joy. That’s the message of The Simpson’s Movie—a laughter-filled epiphany, shared by the multiple voices of a community, and couched in the cool medium of ugly animation.”

Chapter four focuses on the television series Futurama as an ecofeminist cartoon sitcom. The chapter begins with a summary of the episode, “Into the Wild Green Yonder,” concluding “Futurama’s themes provide grist for ecological awareness and, at the same time, complicate a stereotypical environmental agenda.” Again drawing on Bakhtin, the chapter attempts to demonstrate that Futurama is a dialogic enviro-toon. The chapter then includes an extensive summary of the “Into the Wild Green Yonder” episode, with emphasis on the character Leela and her connection with the Ecofeminist Collective. In this chapter, there are nods to early ecofeminists such as Karen J. Warren and Carolyn Merchant, but the bulk of the work provides a lengthy overview of the episode, even ending with the final scene in the show. As the chapter states, “The ship’s recalcitrant robot Bender pops open a bottle, the label of which reads, ‘Old Fortran Malt Liquor.’ He shouts, “into the abyss, meatbags. Or not. Whatever.’”

In chapter five, “Farting Hybrids in South Park’s Rainforest,” the notion of the dialogic enviro-toon again becomes the focus. After a brief overview of the series’ origin and context, the bulk of the chapter summarizes a series of “green” episodes: the April 7, 1999 episode, “Rainforest, Schmainforest,” the March 29, 2006 episode, “Smug Alert,” and the April 26, 2006 episode, “ManBearPig.” Eventually the chapter emphasizes the dialogic character of these episodes, and of South Park in general. According to the chapter, “The carnivalesque discourse of South Park reminds us to laugh at ourselves, even when our cherished environmental values are the object of scathing satire.”

Chapter six offers an overview of Happy Feet (2006), with some comparison to The March of the Penguins (2005). As with other chapters in the work, this summary of Happy Feet highlights its epic qualities with the assertion that the plot of the film “moves forward like a Homeric poem, narrated in the booming preacher-like voice of Robin Williams’ Lovelace  character.” The chapter seeks to illustrate the ways in which the film lines up with Bakhtin’s description of the epic genre, as well. It also gives a nod to definitions of tragic narratives, suggesting, “despite its blissful ending, it exemplifies … tragic discourse.”

Chapter seven reads the animated feature WALL-E (2009) as both a tragic and comic narrative. The suggestion is that this dual approach helps the film “resist [ ] epic status.” And chapter eight examines Avatar (2009) from the perspective of the character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as a tragic hero, thus relegating the film to the status of monologic enviro-toon. Both of these brief chapters include some contextual information, but the bulk of each is devoted to summaries of the film’s plotlines.

Chapter nine explores selected films of Hayao Miyazaki through the lens of deep ecology. The chapter begins with an extended summary of the plot of Spirited Away (2002). Then it offers a brief overview of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononake (1999). After a short biography of Miyazaki, the rest of the chapter primarily summarizes in more detail both Nausicaa and Princess Mononake, with special attention given to the latter film. The chapter ends with the assertion, “The best advice, according to the deep ecology of Miyazaki, is to eschew hate and ‘go on planting your trees.’”

The final chapter serves as a conclusion to the work and seeks to explain the lenses broached in each of the short book’s chapters. Overall, the book may introduce readers to animated green media, such as television series and episodes through its plot summaries, but the most enlightening section of the text for this reviewer was the entertaining Preface. Here the text demonstrated how a multi-media approach might also line up with the more traditional Bakhtinian dialogism. The personal narrative approach reaches out to readers here, revealing the ramifications of what the author calls mediated environmentalism both for herself and her students. The last sentence of that Preface perhaps also broaches the rationale behind the media choices included in the text: they may provide ways to communicate environmental issues to a wide audience.

  

The Johnson County War, the Western, and the Environment

Much has been written about Shane as a classic western responding only peripherally to the Johnson County war of 1892 and (more often) as the embodiment of the ideal western hero. Because the film is a product of a period in which positions on ranching methods were ambivalent, however, its environmental message is limited by its cultural and historical context. Later western films addressing the Johnson County War and its consequences, however, were produced after issues surrounding the environmental impact of various ranching methods had been resolved. Westerns from Rare Breed (1966) to Tom Horn (1980), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Monty Walsh (1970, 2003) begin to demonstrate another, perhaps more crucial, struggle underlying all of their battles—that between land use and environmental conservation and preservation; or ultimate destruction and, hence, failure. The battle between cattle ranchers and homestead farmers grows more complex once environmental and legal history are mined and reveal that cattle ranchers gained more land from the Homestead Act than did family farmers.

The rise of cattle barons in the western United States coincides with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which, along with the Preemptive Act of 1841, provided means for cattlemen to obtain vast acreages of land for little or no money. According to John Upton Terrell, cattle barons used relatives, employees, and even prostitutes to gain the land they wanted to support their free-ranging cattle—160 acres from each person they employed (210). Passage of the Timber Culture Act of 1873 provided them with another way to gain land, this time with the promise to grow trees on at least 40 of the additional 160 acres they gained at no cost to them (210-212). The Desert Land Act of 1877 helped ranchers secure 640 acres more from each of their proxy, as long as they promised to irrigate at least part of it (212-213).

The legal system seemed to be behind ranchers, in spite of what look like attempts to secure land for poor homestead farmers, until the blizzards of 1886-1887 destroyed the ranch economy. The blizzards of 1886-1887 might also be a product of overgrazing. According to Harold E. Briggs, in the fall of 1886,  the Little Missouri Stock Growers’ Association “decided that the ranges were badly overstocked in that roundup district and that in the future ranch hands there should refuse to work with new outfits running either cattle or horses” (533). The blizzards came soon after, with storms so powerful and temperatures so low that they killed from 80-92 percent of all cattle (Briggs 535). These blizzards, interspersed with drought conditions that destroyed grasses by drying them up or burning them away, nearly eradicated both ranchers and farmers. This is mentioned in The Sea of Grass when Brewton contemplates stocking shelters with water and hay.

The Rare Breed (1966) highlights the consequences of these blizzards in the 1880s’ West, in the context of the introduction of Hereford cattle as a crossbreed for Longhorns. The film is loosely based on the life of rancher William Burgess, who was responsible for bringing the Herefords into the American West from England. The film’s opening at an 1884 St. Louis Exposition (exhibited on a banner) establishes the context of the film. And  Englishwoman Martha Evans’ (Maureen O’Hara) Herefordshire bull takes center stage. A bulldogging cowboy, Sam Burnett (James Stewart), leads the bull to its new owner in Texas with some intrigue behind his decision, where Evans attempts to convince Alexander Bowen (Brian Keith), the bull’s new owner, to crossbreed it with his longhorns. After the bull is set free on the open range, a worse than usual winter hits. Blizzards destroy most of Bowen’s cattle, both the longhorns and the Hereford bull, but crossbred calves survive and provide Burnett and Evans with the basis for a growing mixed-breed herd.

After blizzards and droughts in the mid-1880s that nearly annihilated both farmers and ranchers, especially in Wyoming, the conflict between ranchers and farmers came to a head—in the 1892 range war in Johnson County, Wyoming. On the surface, the “war” certainly looks like that between economic classes (with homesteaders on one end, and cattle barons on the other) or, as Richard Maxwell Brown argues, between those in favor of and those against incorporation. In an attempt to eradicate homestead farmers, cattle barons who had rebuilt their ranches and their association after the blizzards and droughts found a way to justify violent action against homesteaders because they branded them as criminals.

With the help of a “literary bureau” (Terrell 256), the Cattle Association flooded newspapers and magazines with false claims that cattle rustlers had run amok in Wyoming and must be stopped using frontier justice, since the local legal system was corrupt. Wyoming law was changed so a state militia would not interfere with the Cattle Association’s hired guns (which they called Regulators). Eventually these Regulators were defeated by a small army of homestead farmers, but Wyoming’s Governor Barber (Terrell 259) intervened, sending false reports to President Harrison and the United States Senate, although newspaper accounts made clear that the Cattle Association’s claims regarding rustlers were completely untrue, and homesteaders “had gathered to defend their lives against hired gunmen and cattlemen bent on destroying them” (Terrell 261) and had not incited war. Tom Horn (1980) highlights gunman Tom Horn (Steve McQueen), who not only works for John Coble (Richard Farnsworth), the land baron behind the Johnson County Wars, but also destroys so many homesteaders that the baron himself supports legal action against him. One of the most notorious film versions of the incident is Heaven’s Gate (1980).

On the surface, cattle ranching seems like a natural choice for the desert like grasslands of the nineteenth century. In fact, like the original in 1970, a remake of Monte Walsh (2003) responds to the frontier’s close after the 1892 range war and valorizes the cowboy mythology as much as did its 1970 original. The film opens in a turn-of-the-century present but then flashes back to Monte’s (Tom Selleck) last winter in a cattle camp. In a clear parallel to the blizzards prior to the Johnson County Range War, the winter wiped out most of the ranchers, and Eastern corporations threatens to destroy a free-range lifestyle that is again depicted as more in harmony with the natural world than is fenced ranching. The conflict between free-range ranchers and corporations is manifested by a cowboy’s killing himself after stringing too much barbed wire. The film even ends with Monte and his horse jumping over an automobile stuck in the mud—a clear dramatization of the superiority of his more natural lifestyle and closer and more environmentally conscious relationship with the natural world. Here it’s not the war that is highlighted but the cowboy lifestyle lost after homestead farmers and corporations won the West—at least within the Western film.

Gene Autry's *Rovin' Tumbleweeds* and the New Deal

Autry’s Rovin’ Tumbleweeds (1939) places New Deal programs at the forefront, this time in relation to flooding like that combated in The River, a documentary promoting TVA projects to thwart flooding on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The River makes it clear that our overuse of the land has caused erosion and loss of top soils that have contributed to the river’s flooding. Pare Lorenz wrote and directed The River in 1937 as a tool for the policies of the Roosevelt administration and the U. S. Farm Security Administration, policies that might be seen as both as socialist and as appropriate for eradicating some of the problems caused by the Great Depression. The film also promotes "the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as the solution to problems of flooding, agricultural depletion, and electrification" (Bordwell and Thompson 58).

Lorentz's The River claims that the best way to solve the problems humans have caused by their degradation of nature is to implement a technological project driven by culture and mankind: The TVA’s construction of enormous dams like the Norris Dam, started in 1933 and finished on March 4, 1936, at the head of the Tennessee River. As the film's narrator argues, "The old river can be controlled. We had the power to take the Valley apart. We have the power to put it together again." According to The River, the TVA’s dams “will transform the old Tennessee into a link of fresh water pools locked and dammed, regulated and controlled.” 

Autry’s Rovin’ Tumbleweeds concentrates on flooding as a problem without discussing its cause. The film instead focuses on its solution—a flood control bill facilitating programs like those promoted in The River but which the local congressman (Fuller) chooses not to support. Like Man of the Frontier, Rovin’ Tumbleweeds opens with a message about the power of water. The first part of the message reads, “Water—Man’s Greatest Friend,” and then we hear a thunder clap and see thrashing storms, and the rest of the message appears: “but unleashed, man’s greatest foe.” A newspaper headline shows us the repercussions of the storm when it claims, “Green River Bursts Banks.”

The force of water has been established, but Autry gives us the cause in an interview with a radio reporter, “We wouldn’t have had this storm—I just wanna tell ya—we wouldn’t have suffered this loss of life and property if that cheap politician Congressman Fuller had put through that flood control bill.” Autry blames politicians for the flooding without referencing a war against nature in Rovin’ Tumbleweeds, unlike the radio interviewer, who proclaims, “It looks like nature has called a truce,” when the storm ends.  Autry, on the other hand, has a philosophy that lines up with that portrayed in The River: To save working farmers and ranchers and their land, the government should intervene.

The film’s connection to New Deal programs rings through the community-minded film. After halting flooding, for example, Autry sings a song about flooding rivers with an image of New Deal proletariats in the background. Headlines that spring up throughout the film carry a similar message. When ranchers washed out by the flooding migrate to Rand County in search of work, headlines read: “Community Minded, Promised Land.” And Congressman Fuller serves as a representative of the corporation keeping them out (The Randville Development Corporation), offering Autry and his fellow workers a tangible entity to fight against, even going to jail to fight for their right to work.

Autry facilitates the fight between working people and greedy corporations and politicians first by singing on the radio and donating his earnings to the people, but his efforts are unsuccessful. Headlines read, “One man relief agency on behalf of all the migratory workers—unfortunately Gene’s generous contributions have proved pitifully inadequate in the face of the ever increasing hordes pouring into Rand County.” When Autry and Congressman Fuller meet at a railway station, however, Autry chooses to be “the man in office who’ll do something” to stop the flooding—a long-term environmental solution that will help ranchers reclaim their lands. The conflict is heightened then, since viewers discover that Halloway and Fuller are a team determined to buy up the land along the Green River before the flood control goes through. Autry’s efforts for the workers pay off—he saves the radio station and saves a camp of migrants from a sheriff who wants to burn them down, so he wins the Congressional election in a landslide.

After a series of failures in Washington D. C., Autry seems on the brink of getting the flood control bill through. But the film takes an odd turn at the end when another storm erupts and the Green River floods again. Gene convinces the Rand County migrants to help him sandbag the banks of the river, and Halloway has a change of heart, joining in with the migrants. On the radio, an announcer says, “With courage and cooperation” they “work side by side” and the flood control is passed. Halloway even gives his money to labor in an act that seems to draw on New Deal socialist inclinations. Environmental degradation is thwarted by community efforts that cross class lines here. The film argues effectively for measures like dams and levies, just as do New Deal films like The River.