Culture . 03/26/2008 03:09 AM . David Sessions

Coming off the surprise success of its 2005 documentary March of the Penguins (it won an Oscar), National Geographic Films introduced children to a few more polar characters last summer in Arctic Tale. In the making for nearly 10 years, the film follows a polar bear and walrus over a decade of their life at the North Pole. The film sports the breathtaking nature footage for which National Geographic is famous, carefully constructed under Queen Latifah’s dark narration about “increasing warmth” making “a demanding world more difficult.”

Arctic Tale, of course, wasn’t the first children’s film to enlist endearing inhabitants of the glacial world in the war against global warming. Come to think of it, movie sequences like this line up in a long string of troubled moments from my childhood: scary hunters burning down Bambi’s forest, irreverent rednecks attempting shoot Copper the hound dog’s fox friend, greedy Englishmen chopping down Pocahontas’ trees, and, blackest of all, a possessed logging machine leveling Fern Gully. And that was before the penguins.

Although it’s hardly the only entertainment company to champion environmental issues, Disney is finally getting the credit it deserves for inspiring children to think green. Cambridge English lecturer David Whitley is now calling Disney’s films the “unsung heroes of the green lobby.” Films like Bambi, originally released in 1937, were among the first pieces of popular art to stir up environmental controversy (pro-hunting groups protested Bambi even before it was released).

The intimate relationship between Hollywood and the green crowd has never been a secret: they hold conventions about green messages, and organizations like the Environmental Media Association work to get green talking points into films. The EMA’s stated goal is “weaving environmental messages within entertainment programming and utilizing ‘celebrity’ for positive role modeling” (Awards are thus presented to the makers of films like Ice Age and FernGully.) The group’s founder, Alan F. Horn, is currently the C.O.O. of Warner Brothers Pictures. And everyone knows how willing celebrities are to lend their hands (or faces, rather) to a fashionable cause.

But something has changed: the environmental edge in children’s films has grown more aggressive in the age where shallow, carbon-footprint-calculating “lite green” is the new black. I rented a handful of recent kid movies and discovered their plots to be a parade of parsimonious green shoutdowns. No longer do these critter tales have a noble respect for nature, where a poignant story deftly cultivates a healthy reverence for the earth. Now, propagandized plotlines and explicit dialogue comes right out and tells the four-year-olds—with reams of scientific data and dire prophecy—that no one cares about their happy little tree friends. Somewhere along the way, the whole idea of an enchanting, suspenseful story was replaced by muddled public policy debates and six-pack rings that can somehow float all the way to Antarctica.

Examining children’s films from the 1940s to the present reveals the increasing belligerence of the green message in children’s stories. The sort of scenario where human villains invade the sanctuaries of animals and fairies has existed as a literary device since pretty much the beginning of time, and, as David Whitley explains, is prominent in Disney’s early animated films. The climax of Bambi centered on hunters coming to the forest, gunning down every creature in their wake, and accidentally burning the entire ecosystem to the ground. The Bambi killers, who never appear onscreen, are some of the more terrifying figures in my childhood memories. When crows began squawking in the dark and Bambi’s father warned, in his chilling bass stag-voice, “there are many this time,” it was almost more than my five-year-old nerves could bear. And that’s not to mention the awful fire sequence, which my sister usually whined for us to fast-forward.

Bambi is children’s storytelling at its finest; it builds ominous suspense and creates a hatred of the hunters without visually depicting them. Sure, hunters are vilified rather unfairly, but they are completely believable as Bambi’s antagonists. The hunter was a clearly-defined villain, a character to be feared and hated by all good deer-loving children. It’s a nature-worshipping setup, but was handled with appropriate literary subtlety. My siblings and I weren’t lectured about the evils of hunting, and never once extended our love of Bambi to the deer our father killed when he and the guys went hunting. That is to say, the evil hunter caricature was a necessary element of the plot, and was kept within the context of the story.

That sort of liberal-minded contextual environmentalism got a makeover in the 1990s, and the invasion-of-nature trope began to get more obnoxious. FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) reached unsurpassed heights in green preachiness, telling the story of a community of rainforest fairies about to be annihilated by loggers and a terrifying, symbolic demon that feeds on oil and smoke. The film opens with a cave-drawing-style prologue about how humans once loved the forest, but have hopelessly lost their way. Aside from the usual scenes of teenage characters making out to a sappy pop ballad and blathering about “believing in yourself,” FernGully is a surprisingly violent environmental sermon from start to finish. Fairies berate a human for living in a city instead of a tree and call his logging machine a “monster.” Literary devices are now subverted in favor of propaganda: the only antagonist in FernGully is humankind in general. People don’t just occasionally end up at odds with nature, they are its satanic mortal enemy. And you—you there in your Mickey Mouse bean bag chair and footy pajamas—are the only one who can stop it!

FernGully was a lone, green suicide bomber among 90’s animated films (it flopped thunderously), but the endearing creatures spouting environmental catch phrases seemed to start getting a little bolder. Disney’s Pocahontas (1995), in addition to more kissing, ballads, and chicken-soup self-actualization, reiterated FernGully’s affection for people of the trees (During an odd sort of lovers’ spat, Pocahontas chides John Smith for not understanding the trees). Disney perhaps made a flimsy attempt to show the Native Americans’ rough side, but the convincing scenes are the ones where Englishmen raze the countryside while (literally) singing the praises of Western civilization.

And now we’re in the ice age, where An Inconvenient Truth wins an Oscar all the kid movies are about penguins, polar bears, and their ever-melting habitat. Like Al Gore’s documentary, the latest children’s films aren’t opposed to taking an explicit, parsimoniously scientific approach. Nowhere does this phenomenon unfold in more excruciating fashion than in 2006’s Happy Feet, the entire plot of which is hinges on a bizarre, invented environmental crisis. Mumble, the film’s protagonist and an outcast from the Emperor penguin community, drags an entangled Macaroni penguin toward a human research settlement to “appeal to their better nature.”

Along the way, the penguins carry on about “the aliens,” witness a piece of machinery plunging into the ocean, and cross a blackened stream strewn with soda cans and more six-pack rings. Mumble eventually ends up in a zoo, where he leads a penguin uprising to get the message to the humans: stop stealing our fish. As a result, world leaders vow to halt overfishing and the world is a better place. Which is all wonderful, except that the central conflict in a story for five-year-olds was just resolved with. . . activism? World outrage? Public policy? How delightfully imaginative.

Just to be clear, the phenomenon is not that kid movies have green messages. That’s been the case since the 1940’s. What’s new is the voluntary incorporation of a politicized environmental agenda at the expense of kid-friendly storytelling. Should small children, the most likely demographic to be enthralled by an all-singing-all-dancing crowd of penguins, be expected to understand the politics of overfishing?

Films like this forsake traditional, literary reverence of nature for scientific lectures with CGI props. And when they’re not lecturing, they’re dispensing a sort of holy terror, where the sensitive feelings of children are forced to feel bad about their species before they’re even old enough to have made any personal choices.

David Sessions is deputy editor of Kritik. His hatred of deer hunting has nothing to do with Bambi.



<