[On April 17th,
1937, Daffy Duck made his debut, in the Warner Brothers cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” In
honor of that foul-tempered feathered friend, this week I’ve AmericanStudied
five animated histories. Leading up to this weekend post on animation and the
environment—add your thoughts, on this topic or any animation histories, in
comments, please!]
In honor of both
Earth Day and my participation in the Boston March for Science (on which
more in this space in a couple weeks), three examples of the link between
animation and the environment:
1)
Captain Planet and the
Planeteers/The New Adventures
of Captain Planet (1990-96): As a viewer and fan of the show since its
first episodes, I might be biased, but it seems to me that Ted Turner and
Barbara Pyle’s environmental edutainment program (or programs, since the show
changed its name when Hanna-Barbera took over principal production in 1993) Captain Planet was one of the most
radical and influential children’s shows of all time. The show’s consistent environmental
activist themes and stories should be evidence enough for that claim; but if not,
I would point to the 1992
episode “A Formula for Hate,” in which the villain sought to spread lies
and paranoia about AIDS and thus to turn a town against an HIV-infected young
man (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris). My pre-Boston March
for Science talk is on science and public activism, and I can’t imagine a
clearer embodiment of that link than this Captain
Planet episode.
2)
FernGully: The Last
Rainforest (1992): 1992 was a banner year for environmental animation,
as it also saw the release of FernGully,
a joint Australian and American animated film (based on Diana Young’s
children’s novel of the same name) about the growing threats to the world’s
rainforests. Among its many achievements, FernGully
succeeded in bringing Cheech
and Chong back together for the first time in six years; it also perhaps
influenced the casting of John
Woo’s Broken Arrow (1996), which
likewise featured a pairing of Samantha Mathis and Christian Slater. They, like
all of the film’s voice actors (including Robin Williams in his first animated
film as Batty) worked for scale, as all were committed to the film’s
environmental and conservationist messages. Indeed, I’d argue that Captain Planet and FernGully together reflect the leading role pop culture played in
advancing those issues in the early 1990s—a trend worth remembering whenever we’re
tempted to dismiss pop culture’s social or communal roles.
3)
Princess Mononoke
(1997): Legendary animation
director Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 historical fantasy anime film illustrates
that those cultural contributions to environmental activism were taking place
around the globe. Like FernGully, Mononoke uses the genre of fantasy to
tell its story of supernatural and human heroes working together to fight for
an embattled natural world against encroaching forces. Often the genre of anime
has been associated with futuristic and urban settings; but Miyazaki’s film,
among others in the era, redirected the genre’s
tropes and themes to the historical and natural worlds. Like Captain Planet and FernGully before it, Mononoke
was an international hit (as well as a box office smash in
Japan), with its English-language version becoming one of the
most popular Hollywood adaptations of an anime or Japanese film of all
time. In my experience, Earth Day really took off as a collective phenomenon in
the 1990s—and if so, we might well have these pioneering 1990s animations to
thank.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Any other animation or cartoon thoughts you’d share?
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