Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox's Fern Gully (1992)

Abstract

Informed by ecocriticism, this article conducts a comparative examination of two contemporary animated children's films, Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fern Gully (1992). While both films advocate for the prevention of deforestation, they are, to varying degrees, antithetical to environmentalism. Both films reject the principles of deep ecology in displacing responsibility for environmental destruction on to ‘supernatural’ forces and exhibit anthropocentric concern for the survival of humans. We argue that these films constitute divergent methodological approaches for environmental consciousness-raising in children's entertainment. The western world production demonstrates marked conservatism in its depiction of identity politics and ‘cute’ feminization of nature, while Hayao Miyazaki's film renders nature sublime and invokes complex socio-cultural differences. Against FernGully's ‘othering’ of working-class and queer characters, we posit that Princess Mononoke is decidedly queer, anti-binary and ideologically bi-partisan and, in accord with the underlying principle of environmental justice, asks child audiences to consider compassion for the poor in association with care for nature.

Notes

1. Fox Animation Studios went on to produce several of its own animated films including Anastasia (1997) and Titan A. E. (2000). The Studio was shut down in 2000 due to several box-office disappointments, but has since been revived in 2009. In the intervening years, the Disney monopoly on animated films of the twentieth-century has been somewhat dismantled, and the tenor of such films transformed, by DreamWorks Animation and Pixar Animation Studios (though it was acquired by Disney in 2006).

2. Perhaps with the exceedingly subtle exception of Hexxus's name, including the unusual double ‘x’ that invokes Exxon, the famous corporate environmental villain for knowledgeable adults

3. See Freiberg (2006) for an extensive discussion of the way in which Miyazaki links the shojo figure with environmentalism and social criticism.

4. In her chapter ‘Fierce flesh: Sexy schoolgirls in the fantasy of Sailor Moon’, Anne Allison describes Sailor Moon's uniform as replicating Japanese girls' school uniform. She draws attention to the uniformed schoolgirl as ‘a dominant trope in pornography, comics, and sex culture in general in Japan’ (2006, 133–134).

5. The film mirrors real world actions to involve children in environmental preservation. The awkward realities of land and resource consumption that are integral to maintaining the living standards of Western children are absent in the positive presentations of tree-planting initiatives as fostering ‘future generations of committed environmental custodians’. See Australia's National Tree Day: http://treeday.planetark.org/about/. At an international level, Plant for the Planet, in support of the UN Billion Tree Campaign, encourages and organizes children to achieve the goal of planting one million trees in each country. Planting trees is figured as real action against climate change, combating the perception that ‘adults just talk and don't act’ therefore ‘it's up to us, the children, to take matters into our own hands’. See http://www.plant-for-the-planet.org/

6. See Mallan and McGillis (2005) for an examination of Disney's Aladdin (1992); Sawers and Parsons on The Lion King (1994), The Incredibles (2004), Stuart Little (1999) and Shark Tale (2004); and Griffin (2004) for a focus on negative depictions of queerness in The Lion King.