Animation as Ecocinema

Skyler Wolf

Ecocinema is a difficult term to define. In fact, scholars claim that every film can be viewed through an ecocritical lens, each film having its own interpretation of nature and our relationship with it (Rust, Monani, 3) When you think of environmental films and shows, you probably think of March of the Penguins, David Attenborough’s narration in something like Our Planet, or maybe even a biopic like 2017’s Jane on the environmentalist Jane Goodall. But when considering ecocinema, how often do we think of animation? Does it have the same power to make us reevaluate our planet like a live action film does? Can an animated film invoke the desire to make a lasting change on Earth like any other film can?

Two films come to mind as hallmarks of the ability animated films have to be ecocinema: Miyazaki’s 1997 masterpiece Princess Mononoke and Verbinski’s underappreciated 2011 gem Rango. The two have different messages, different visuals, and very different storylines, yet each has something important to say about our world.

Princess Mononoke follows the young prince Ashitaka in medieval Japan as he leaves his kingdom to go West, hoping to search for a cure for the curse brought down upon him by a demonic boar. During his quest, he meets San, a young woman raised by wolves who seeks to protect the forest from human interference. In the nearby Irontown, Lady Eboshi seeks to destroy the forest to expand her iron production, which has allowed Irontown to stand as long as it has against enemy samurai clans.

Mononoke stands apart from other fictional ecocinema because it has no clear antagonist. Considering Emmerich’s 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, the US vice president is the true bad guy because he is the one blocking climate change prevention policy. The film has a very clear structure with heroes to root for and a villain to look down upon. Mononoke, however, denies the viewer a simple plot structure. San is initially the movie’s villain despite being plastered over all of the film’s posters – she despises the human race, believing herself to be a wolf, and wants to wipe out anyone who intrudes upon the forest.

Lady Eboshi, too, begins as a sort of gray-area hero, helping Ashitaka with his wounds and providing him sanctuary. As alliances shift throughout the film, with human and animal clans alike turning against each other, the film posits that there is no sole culprit for the destruction of our natural world. We all contribute to it, and there must be a unified effort to stop deforestation, pollution, war, if we are to get anywhere. In the end, Ashitaka and San manage to unite the human and animal forces, turning the fight into a mutual agreement for the humans to rebuild Irontown after its destruction from the war, keeping in mind the preservation of the forest above all.

While San and Ashitaka are destined to unite the human and natural worlds, the eponymous Rango is a nobody. He is a chameleon who dreams of becoming an actor when the tank he’s held in falls off the back of a truck, leaving him in the middle of the desert. Eventually he finds himself in the town of Dirt, which has a water shortage problem. This is when Rango decides his name, along with inventing a hardened gunslinger personality. Rango promises to bring water back to the people of Dirt, and his investigation leads him to the town’s mayor itself, who has been holding back water from the people to buy the destroyed land in the town for cheap. Rango eventually outsmarts the mayor after joining forces with all of the other animals in the town and even the desert trees, also desperate for water. Rango picks up on the water privatization issues of the world, highlighting how the wealthy few can easily abuse the masses. It is a film that asserts water as a basic right for all.

Something these films have in common is an intended audience much wider than one may assume. There is a tendency to associate animated films with children, but these movies prove that that is not the case. The first time we see San in Mononoke, she is healing her “mother” wolf by sucking on her wounds and spitting out streams of blood. As Ashitaka looks upon her for the first time, her face is caked with the blood of the wolf. Rango, too, is full of adult jokes, ranging from sex to metajokes about how the film hopes to win awards at the Academy.

While it may seem like a simple thing, opening animated films up to an adult audience does wonders for bringing animated films into the ecocinema world. An adult can enjoy the beautifully animated action scenes in Mononoke or laugh at a joke in Rango as much as they can gawk at March of the Penguins. By opening up the audience more, these films also allow for their messages to be heard by more people, an essential element of ecocinema.

Again, we must return to the question of why do we not associate animated films with ecocinema? Sometimes it’s just not fun to listen to Tim Allen narrate some raw footage of chimps in Chimpanzee or to listen to a real-life story. It’s okay to want adventure in your films, to immerse yourself in a fictional world. No medium like animation is able to create such worlds. No live-action film is going to give you giant gods of destruction and pestilence like in Mononoke. We cannot be strict with ecocinema and gatekeep against the wonderful world of animation. Each of these films provides an ecocritical exploration (Rust, Monani, 3) of the world just like any live-action movie could. So next time you sit down to watch an environmental film, don’t limit yourself to just The Day After Tomorrow.

References

Hayao, Miyazaki, director. Princess Mononoke. Toho, 1997.

Rust, Stephen, et al. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.

Verbinski, Gore, director. Rango. Paramount Pictures, 2011.

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