Enviro-Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television

Abstract

Sitting at her desk one day poring over research for a project aimed at creating a taxonomy of “hope” in contemporary environmental discourse, Deidre Pike realized that she felt far more hopeful about the state of the planet when screening and discussing animated films and television shows with her media studies students than she did when sifting through academic and activist literature. Armed with this realization, Pike has produced Enviro-Toons, a timely and fascinating study of environmental messages in contemporary animation that makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies. Although animation geared for children and adolescents may appear at first glance to trivialize complex ecological concerns, Pike argues against a monolithic view of the medium. Pike's analysis draws on a wide range of sources, while her central thesis combines the theories of media scholar Marshall McLuhan with those of literary scholars Joseph Meeker and Mikhail Bahktin to argue that animated texts can be situated along a continuum that ranges from problematic, exploitative texts like Avatar and Happy Feet, which Pike describes as hot (highly detailed), epic (anthropocentric), and monologic (closed), to engaging, ecocritical texts like South Park and Futurama, which are cool (less detailed), comic (ecocentric), and dialogic (open to interpretation). Between these extremes are films like Wall-E, which is hot, yet comedic and dialogic. Enviro-Toons is sufficient in scope and range to articulate this thesis effectively.