The Secret of NIMH (1982) and Animal Rights

Disney films from the 1940s and 1950s that grapple with animal treatment may range from those advocating animal rights, sometimes at the expense of other species, to those that rest on a biosocial moral paradigm that provides a space for interdependence in service to the community. But they all demonstrate that the animal rights/animal welfare debate was well under way before Peter Singer’s animal liberation movement gained force. These films also served as grounding for films with more explicit animal rights messages. 

These Disney films lay the groundwork for a later film with a more explicitly forceful animal-rights message like that found in The Secret of NIMH (1982). The film is the first feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney Studios to join an independent animation team, a connection that aligns the film further with the earlier Disney animated features. According to Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times, The Secret of NIMH  "is an attempt to return to the rich, fully detailed animation that is known as ‘classic’ Disney animation” (C17), a goal that, according to Roger Ebert, Don Bluth and his team successfully executed. Ebert asserts regarding the film: “they have succeeded in reproducing the marvelous detail and depth of the Disney classics. This is a good-looking, interesting movie that creates a little rodent world right under the noses of the indifferent local humans“ (“The Secret”).

Ebert also likes the film’s premise: In a seemingly direct reaction to both Disney and Singer’s text, the film argues vehemently against animal testing and experimentation and, according to Ebert, asks the question: “What if a group of laboratory animals were injected with an experimental drug that made them as intelligent as humans?” (“The Secret”). As Nicodemus, the rat narrator, reveals, scientists from NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, captured and performed dangerous experiments on mice and rats that ultimately increased their intelligence. Nicodemus explains the plight of the rat community to Mrs. Brisby, a mouse who comes to the rats for help, telling her that her husband, Jonathan “made possible the rats’ escape from the terrible … NIMH.” 

Jonathan’s matronly wife, Mrs. Brisby, helps them outsmart human farmers and the NIMH Institute, ensuring a move to Thorn Valley away from the bulldozers meant to destroy them. In The Secret of NIMHthe rights of animals overshadow those of humans, not only because human characters serve only minor roles in the film but also because humans mistreat animals both in the laboratories of NIMH and on the farm. The Secret of NIMH, then, explicitly argues against cruel mistreatment of animals both in laboratories and in “the field,” while demonstrating that animals deserve rights because they so resemble us. Together these films also paved the way for environmentally conscious animal welfare films like Bee Movie. For us they also highlight that the roots of both the environmental and animal rights movements were well in place before either Singer’s animal liberation or the contemporary environmental movement.

Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Animal Welfare

Lady and the Tramp connects human and nonhuman nature by focusing on domesticated dogs. Although dogs are “imprisoned” by dogcatchers and a visiting aunt, ultimately they are on equal ground with their human owners in a relationship like that described by Mary Midgley’s and Hume’s ethical theories. According to Bosley Crowther’s New York Timesreview, “the various types of canines that are burlesqued in human terms are amusing—if you like canines endowed with the mannerisms of human beings” (“Disney’s Lady” 17). Although Crowther asserts that “Mr. Disney’s affection for dogs is more sugary than his appreciation of mice and ducks,” but their representation highlights an interconnection between animal welfare and environmentalism. 

Dogs are at the center of the film from its opening forward. The film opens with a dedication to dogs that shows us how loved and appreciated dogs can be in a small town at Christmas. The focus is on one house and family with a puppy in a laundry basket in the spotlight. We do not see the humans’ faces, only the pup, Lady. Lady’s space is opulent, and she is valued as a member of the family, even moving into their bed. When Lady is an adult, the interdependent relationship between herself and Jim and Darling continues; she still sleeps in her owners’ bed and gets Jim his slippers. She catches the newspaper and takes it in the house. Jim and Darling feed her doughnuts and coffee and give her a license on a collar at six months. Lady shares her equal footing in the human world with other dogs, as well: a Scottie dog named Jock, and a hound dog named Trusty, who dreams of tracking animals through a swamp. With a collar, Lady is now full grown—with a “badge of faith and respectability.” She runs to “Jim Dear” when he whistles and holds a treat on her nose while up on hind legs. She is happy on the carpet between her two human companions.

Tramp, on the other hand, is a carefree bachelor mutt living in a barrel at a train station, but he also shares an interconnected relationship with humans, even though he lives on the street, begging meals from chefs at Tony’s Restaurant. But Tramp also helps keep dogs free from exploitation, so when a dog pound wagon goes by and the driver posts a sign about unlicensed dogs being confiscated, he sets two dogs in the wagon free and distracts the dogcatcher by leading him away from the other dogs and to “snob hill” where he overhears Lady’s complaints about her owners: “Jim Dear and Darling are acting so” strange she says, so she feels less like a family member.We see the scenes of Lady’s mistreatment in flashback: Jim tells Lady to get down instead of giving her the usual treat. He calls her “that dog.” Darling knits in a rocking chair and says “no” when Lady brings her the leash to walk her. Darling will not play ball and gets angry when Lady picks up yarn. After hearing about these changes, Trusty and Jock tell her about the coming present—a baby. Tramp walks by while they explain, and he tells her about some of the bad consequences of a new baby. It seems that the biotic relationship will be shattered. When a baby moves in, a dog moves out. Then we see a montage of scenes that prove he is right—baby shower, birth, Lady forgotten and ignored, predictions that seem real when her owners leave her with Aunt Sarah and her two conniving Siamese Cats. 

Aunt Sarah blames Lady for her cats’ misbehavior and punishes her, seemingly negating the biotic community established earlier in the film. When Sarah decides to muzzle Lady, she runs away, escaping feral dogs with Tramp’s help, free until a dogcatcher captures her. The aunt further breaks up the biotic community Jim and Darling seemed to build with Lady when she takes her home from the pound and chains her to a doghouse in the back yard. Jock and Trusty want to help her by marrying her. They have comfortable homes where she would be welcome. Tramp comes in with a bone, and they turn their backs on him, blaming him for Lady’s plight. She is upset about the dog pound, but a storm comes in, and a rat is in the woodpile and heading toward the baby. By thwarting the rat, Lady and Tramp prove their dedication to humans and again gain access to their world, in spite of the Aunt’s vile treatment of them. 

Lady’s owners’ return reignites the biotic relationship between humans and at least domesticated animals in the film. When Darling and Jim come home, they see the dogcatcher taking Tramp away and think Tramp attacked their baby. But Lady shows them the now dead rat. Jim sees it, and the other dogs save Tramp from the dogcatcher, leaving Trusty with a broken leg. Lady and Tramp have four puppies by the next Christmas with the baby looking on. And Jock and Trusty comes to Lady’s house for breakfast. Trusty tells stories from grandfather “old Reliable” to Lady and Tramp’s pups and the story ends, with the human and animal worlds interconnected, at least in this domestic realm.

191955

Alice in Wonderland and The Call for Separation

Alice in Wonderland demonstrates the need to separate the human world from the world of the imagination and, in so doing, argues for the separation of human and nonhuman nature. According to Deborah Ross, this bifurcation extends to the conflict between rational control and irrational imagination (54). In Alice in Wonderland, unlike The Adventures of Ichabod and Toad, the animal world is the treacherous and irrational world, and the human world is rational, peaceful and calm. The film opens on the human world, a pastoral scene with shade trees and a lake with swans where Alice, “a rosy-cheeked, ruby-lipped darling right off Mr. Disney’s drawing-board, a sister of Snow White, Cinderella, and all the fairy-tale princesses he has drawn” (Crowther “Disney’s Cartoon” 12) throws a garland of flowers down from her tree limb onto her governess. 

This secure space is disrupted when Alice and her kitten follow a talking rabbit into his rabbit hole, an animal world of imagination constructed as dangerous and frightening. On her journey, she encounters a beach where oysters are eaten by a carpenter, talking and singing flowers who deride her as a weed, an opium-smoking caterpillar who (as a butterfly) tells her about a magic mushroom, a Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter and Door Mouse and their unbirthday party.

That sense of danger culminates in Alice’s encounters in two settings: a mystic forest and an evil queen’s maze. In the mystical Tulgey Woods, Alice encounters walking eyeglasses, honky horn ducks, frog drums and cymbals, umbrella dodo birds, digging shovel birds, cage-bird finches, and a pencil bird that shows her a path until a broom dog sweeps it away: “If I get home I shall write a book about this place,” she says, and as she cries, the moon transforms into the Cheshire Cat, causing Alice to exclaim that she must leave this dangerous world: “I’m through with rabbits. I want to go home,” she says, and the cat opens a door in his tree and shows her the queen’s maze, the last of the dangerous settings Alice must traverse. The maze is a short cut, and she takes it to group of walking playing cards, who are painting roses. Alice is put on trial when the queen accuses her of lifting her skirt, but the animals, who had earlier confused Alice, help her escape. “Today is your unbirthday, too,” they tell the queen and roll out an unbirthday party.

Alice must use elements of the dangerous world to escape it. She eats part of the mushroom she saved in her pocket and grows so tall she must leave the courtroom immediately. Alice fights back with new stature but grows small again. She calls the queen a fat tyrant, and the queen yells, “Off with her head.” Alice runs through the maze with black and white cards chasing in an amazing effect. She passes each of the parts of her journey in Wonderland: the circle of birds on the shore, the tea party, the caterpillar, and the doorknob. 

In clear opposition to the novel from which the film was adapted and a reinforcement of the bifurcation between rational human and imaginative nonhuman worlds, Alice is saved, according to Ross, “not by facing [the cards] down with dawning maturity and confidence, like the ‘real’ Alice, but by waking up” (57). She sees herself asleep through the keyhole, and in a dream has a spiral effect and wakes up, reciting the caterpillar’s crocodile poem. The governess tells her to “come along. It’s time for tea,” and Alice goes willingly, glad to escape the danger of the animal world where walruses eat oysters presented as babies in bonnets, no matter how imaginatively constructed, for the safe human world in which she lives. Alice in Wonderland foregrounds the need to separate human and nonhuman nature, painting a negative picture of an animal world filled with terror and danger, without providing a space in which environmentalism and animal welfare can connect. 

The Advantures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) and Animal Rights Arguments

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad includes two distinctly different views, one of nonhuman and the other of human nature. The first narrative constructs nonhuman nature as ultimately good and kind in spite of villains thwarted by the heroes, but the second narrative constructs human nature as calculating and vindictive, with heroes demonstrating more weaknesses than strengths. This contrast is evident in the varying success of each. As A. W. asserts in his New York Timesreview, “the human figures in these adventures are stilted awkward creatures…. But in “Mr. Toad” [Disney] has limned a wondrously blithe bucko from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows” (18). 

The first narrative, the story of Toad, draws on The Wind in the Willows, a classic children’s book in which animal characters play distinctly human roles, highlighting Peter Singer’s claim that “All animals are equal” (1). This part of the film anthropomorphizes animals so much that their actions support Singer’s claim that “to avoid speciesism we must allow that beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life” (19). 

The second narrative retells The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in which the very human Ichabod Crane “loses his head” (at least figuratively) over a beautiful daughter of a rich farmer. Juxtaposing the two narratives highlights the separation between human and nonhuman nature foregrounded in both Bambiand Dumbo, this time clearly at the expense of the less valorized human nature.

Toad, the hero in The Wind in the Willows, is represented as a lighthearted and carefree aristocrat with a taste for new, again human, technology, so much so that he attempts to buy a car in exchange for his manor house. Toad is accused of stealing the car, is prosecuted and sent to prison but escapes to reclaim the deed to his home and, with the help of his friends Rat and Mole, prove his innocence. 

Toad and his friends are constructed as sympathetic human-like intelligent persons, but the weasels and their leader, Mr. Winky, represent more negative human qualities. When Toad escapes, the humane nature of his and his friends’ characters emerge. When they all learn Mr. Winky, a bartender who double-crossed Toad, is the leader of the gang that has the deed to Toad Hall, they agree to help him, “To prove your innocence we’ve got to get that paper away from Winky.” They succeed, but when he is exonerated, the narrator says Toad was reformed by New Year, but now he has a biplane and flies over Toad Hall! The likable Toad maintains his obsession with new technology, but he also represents how effectively he and his friends have been anthropomorphized as a way to draw on human sympathy. Even though Toad is depicted as a flawed character, none of his weaknesses harm others deliberately. The film only constructs the weasels in a negative light, clearly foregrounding the positive human-like qualities shared by all of these lovable animals. 

In the story of Ichabod Crane, on the other hand, the narrative highlights the negative human qualities shared by all the human characters in conflict throughout the tale. Ichabod and Bron Bones compete for Katrina’s hand in marriage. But Bron Bones wins Katrina by scaring Ichabod away first by telling stories of a headless horseman and then, presumably, by disguising himself as the horseman to literally chase Ichabod away. In this retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollowanimals play only a service role, as horses carrying the headless horseman and Ichabod. The human world is indeed separated from that of nature, even in the agricultural community in Sleepy Hollow. More importantly, the segment highlights a human world of sometimes-violent duplicity with little chance for redemption, a stark contrast to the delightful animal world of The Wind in the Willows.

Enviro-Toons?

Enviro-toons—animated shorts and feature films with ecology at their center—ask an audience to re-perceive everyday issues, themes, and knowledge related to differing phases of the American environmental movement: human ecology, organismic ecology, economic ecology, and chaotic ecology. The field of ecology, literally the study of homes, as its Greek root oikos (which translates as “household”) suggests, was named by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, in response to Charles Darwin’s work in evolutionary theory in the 1850s. According to Annette Kolodny, Haeckel’s notion of ecology as the study of homes served as the inspiration for the development of the field of human ecology.            

The human ecology movement grew out of the work of Chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, who translated Haeckel’s work from its original German and, according to Robert Clarke, introduced the concept of ecology in the United States. Richards defined human ecology as "the study of the surroundings of human beings in the effects they produce on the lives of men" (1910). Since she viewed humans as part of nature, she considered urban problems like air and water pollution as products of human activity imposed on the environment and, subsequently, best resolved by humans. The human ecology movement eventually evolved into home economics, but its grounding in conservation had lasting effects. A 1948 New York Times editorial, for example, endorsed a smoke abatement protest by “urg[ing] housewives and others to take this opportunity” to join the anti-pollution campaign. 

Organismic ecology is based on Frederic Clements’ view of a plant community as a living organism that evolves through succession. According to Clements, as a living organism, a plant community changes over time: “The unit of vegetation, the climax formation is an organic entity. As an organism, the formation arises, grows, matures, and dies…. The climax formation is the adult organism, the fully developed community” (Clements 124-25 qtd. in Merchant 182). This process of succession paralleled both the life cycle and the developmental history of the United States, with pioneer species invading ecosystems until climax communities of species were established: the deciduous forest climax, the prairie-plains climax, the mountain range climaxes of the Rocky Mountains, and the desert climaxes of the Southwest. A plant community is also vulnerable to disruption or death by technologies such as those that caused the Dust Bowl, however, when humans as pioneer species “had not appreciated or understood the grassland biome native to the Plains” (Merchant 184). 

The organismic school of ecology “rejected Social Darwinist assumptions of a nature characterized by Thomas Henry Huxley as ‘red in tooth and claw,’ for a nature of cooperation among individuals in animal and human communities” (Merchant 184). Warder C. Allee and Alfred E. Emerson, organismic ecologists at the University of Chicago after World War I, saw the workings of the natural world as a model for healing societal problems. Organismic ecologist Aldo Leopold, on the other hand, applied human ethics to the natural world, constructing a manifesto, “The Land Ethic,” which encouraged an ecologically centered view of the land as a biotic pyramid in which humans were a part. In Leopold’s view, humans had “the scientific and ethical tools to follow nature and heal it” (Merchant 185).

Whereas the organismic approach to ecology encouraged preservationist policies toward the environment; the economic approach, in which ecosystems were seen as sums of their parts, not living organisms, encouraged fair use politics that called for the exploitation of resources for human gain. Such an approach valorized humans as managers who were “above nature and able to control it” (Merchant 186) and use environmental resources for human benefit. Economic ecologist Kenneth Watt asserts, for example, that human beings are economic animals, and “economic ecology’s goal is to maximize the productivity of each type of ecosystem and each level of that ecosystem for human benefit” (qtd. in Merchant 188). Although ecologist Eugene Odum connected the tenets of organismic ecology with those of the economic to demonstrate ways humans can repair the natural world, the ultimate goal of economic ecology—maximizing benefits of nature for humans—serves as more of a disruption than a tool for healing. Human ecology, organismic ecology, and economic ecology, however, are all products of Haeckel’s development of ecology as a field in his 1866 work, Generelle Morphologie der Organsmen, and overlapped from at least the late 1910s forward. 

The last approach, chaotic ecology, did not emerge in its current form until the 1970s, when chaos theory was developed. Chaotic ecology views nature as a potential disruptor of its own ecosystems through natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, for example. Since both human and nonhuman nature disrupt nature, this theory suggests, then “both can work in partnership to restore it” (Merchant 190). Yet chaotic ecology’s premise that nature disrupts its own ecosystems also parallels an ancient view of the natural world as a powerful force that sometimes overwhelms human nature.

Although these four approaches are sometimes seen as linear phases, they are rooted in Haeckel’s definitions of ecology and continue to influence environmental policy. They also continue to influence media responses to nature and the natural world, at least in the world of the short or feature-length animated film. We assert, then, that American enviro-toons from the 1930s forward reveal three narrative and aesthetic patterns in relation to the historical and cultural context and approach to ecology underpinning them:

• the power of nature over the human world,
• the need for controlling human intervention and nurturing the natural world in order to strengthen their interdependence, and
• criticism of human exploitation of the natural world.

Ecocinema in the City Introduction

In Ecocinema in the City, we argue that urban ecocinema both reveals and critiques Price’s vision of urban environmentalism. Ecocinema in the Cityhighlights films that move beyond nature as “an antidote to cities and modern life” (Price 542) to reveal the complex and sometimes contradictory views of nature in the cities where we live. Urban ecocinema helps reveal how both human and nonhuman nature can interact sustainably and thrive. 

Routledge Book Site

Ecocinema in the City embraces the urban ecologies sometimes missing in the environmental movement, moving beyond a focus on “wildness” (Price 553). In both 20th and 21st century movies, however, nature and culture are typically bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and many times deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened.

This book project highlights the increasingly transformative power of nature in urban settings explored in film. Most urban nature films emphasize a toxic city like that of film noir. But others provide more positive perspectives on the natural world. Our organizational structure seeks to reveal the increasing importance nonhuman nature plays in urban settings. Nature’s restorative properties depend on humanities’ willingness to embrace both human and nonhuman nature. 

Although still drawing on toxic visions of the city, some films demonstrate the possibilities of narratives of environmental adaptation. Others go further and highlight interdependent relationships between humans and the natural world. 

A few urban nature films demonstrate a truly sustainable worldview, however, providing attainable solutions to environmental injustice and racism that combine conservation with preservation to, as Jenny Price declares, “take [] joy in wild nature…. [and] take[] joy in our everyday connections to nature” (553). Such a definition of environmentalism includes the city, for “It is an environmentalism, all told, in which our joy in wild nature is widely and deeply informed by the great joy of using nature well” (Price 553). This book project seeks to add to urban ecocinema scholarship by exploring four sections arranged to highlight the increasing importance nature performs in the city: Evolutionary Myths Under the City, Urban Eco-Trauma, Urban Nature and Interdependence, and The Sustainable City. The first two sections, “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” and “Urban Eco-Trauma,” take more traditional ecocinema approaches and emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space. 

Future Cities in Film Endnotes

End Notes

[1]This perspective on sustainable architecture stresses the need to conserve resources throughout the urban development process, avoiding the exploitation showcased in documentaries such as Sand Wars (2013). Written and directed by Denis Delestrac and released by Green Planet Films, Sand Warstravels around the globe to examine the vital issue of the exploitation of sand. While many of us think of beach erosion when we consider the vital nature of sand, Delestrac makes clear that the need for silica drives the world's construction industries and has led to the planet's reserves of sand being dangerously depleted.

[1]Such a green architectural vision is explored in earlier documentaries, as well. See for example, Sustainable Architecture (2004) begins by providing a history of resource use around the world. To move towards inefficiency, the documentary argues that we must plan better, decrease embodied energy use, decrease energy and resources used during construction, and take a holistic approach that is fair and equitable.

[1]Changing Nature (2005) also highlights repercussions and responses to climate change around the globe. In Morocco, for example, woman-centered organizations help stop forest depletion and encourage education, family planning, and sustainable farming techniques. Sustainable development and family planning are stressed as solutions to environmental problems in the Ukraine, Mexico, and Vietnam.

[1]See for example The Thaw (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), The Colony (2013), and Into the Storm (2014), and Noah (2014) as cli-fi films exploring climate change primarily outside urban areas. Day After Tomorrow, Half-Life(2008), and Godzilla (2014), however, do integrate the city in their discussions of climate change. 

[1]Like The Hunger Games, Elysium (2013) separates rich and powerful from the poor providing their resources, but in Elysiuma population explosion has created a global slum on earth, forcing the privileged to build their utopian city above ground in a sky city. The Congress (2013) offers utopian urban visions only in an animated world that drug-addicted residents create for themselves. In the non-animated “real” world, animated heroes are revealed to be homeless and despairing victims. Only those living in large airships above the slums below provide hope in this dystopic future. The Neo-Seoul segment of Cloud Atlas (2012) highlights technology and genetic engineering in a Vice City. The Zero Theorem (2013) offers a dystopian Terry Gilliam vision like that of Brazil (1985). 

[1]Big Hero 6 (2014) also suggests technology can address racial, economic, and, perhaps, environmental conflicts in a Disneyfied fictional and animated San Fransokyo.