Dear Children of America,
I used to be one of you.
I used to beg and wheedle and whine and kick and scream to go to the cartoons. Any cartoons.
Mumble channels Gregory Hines in Happy Feet.
Photo: © Warner Bros. Pictures
There was just something about those drawings-come-to-life (computer animation was just a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye back then) that I couldn't resist, especially if the cartoon featured at least one preternaturally cute baby animal. Read Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, the Ewoks TV show.
But I also used to hate entertainment-with-a-message. Even when I was in pigtails, I rolled my eyes at After School Specials and Very Special Episodes of Growing Pains. It was never the message per se that made my skin crawl; drunk driving and homeless Leonardo DiCaprios were, I agreed, bad. Rather, it was the beat-me-over-the-head-with-a-love-cleaver method that folks in Hollywood employed to make their points, subtlety be darned.
So I steeled myself to be both charmed and slightly annoyed by Happy Feet, an animated movie with an environmental message that follows an emperor penguin named Mumble (Elijah Wood) from egghood to fuzzy babyhood to kinda-fuzzy young adulthood. His dad, Memphis (Hugh Jackman), drops him as an egg, and as a result Mumble can't sing a lick -- but he can dance like Gregory Hines.
Exactly how socially debilitating is a lack of singing ability in Antarctica? Imagine a world where every kid in your school is texting away like a fiend, but you were born with some freaky condition that makes your fingers swell up like balloons every time they get near a Sidekick. In other words, instant social death.
Anyhoo, Mumble's singing deformity and unnaturally happy feet are soon noticed by the penguins' spiritual leader, who swiftly blames him for every problem in the colony, including a recent fish shortage. (Side note: Said spiritual leader is suspiciously reminiscent of John Lithgow's tyrannical anti-dancing minister in Footloose. Never heard of it? Ask your parents to rent the flick for you in a couple of years, if only for a chuckle at the tractor-chicken scene and Kevin Bacon's hair.) After he infects the colony with dancing fever, Mumble is cast out by The Man and heads off with his mandatory coterie of cartoon sidekicks to find the "aliens" he's convinced are taking all the fish.
Naturally, he soon finds them in the form of human beings manning massive fishing trawlers. Flinging his brave little fuzzy body into the roiling waters, he chases down the trawlers, hoping to talk the aliens into giving back the fish. Courageous acts, social redemption, and consciousness raising ensue.
First, the good news: I was not annoyed by Happy Feet's environmental message. The movie manages to introduce complex issues (food chain disruption) in surprisingly subtle ways (birds start stalking baby penguins because they don't have enough fish to eat). Now, the bad news: Everything else in the movie annoyed me.
Here's my Happy Feet genesis theory: A bunch of movie executives got together and decided that if they dumped every cartoon convention into a Big Movie grinder, they might end up with a hit.
Judging from the last couple of weeks' box office totals, they were right. Alas, their cookie-cutter cartoon-with-an-environmental-message also comes with a few unadvertised messages -- and socially irresponsible ones at that. Apparently, all females in the South Pole are hip-swaying, breathy-voiced, man-crazed pushovers, all Mexicans are short, and all African-Americans are superfly playas. It seems Antarctica is a land of overwrought stereotypes as well as overwrought singing.
Of course, judging from all the giggles I heard coming from you kids in the audience, maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand modern animation at its finest. (And to the few of you who turned around and glared at me as I whispered frantic apologies to my roommate for dragging her to this movie, I'm sorry.) But can you blame me for dreaming of a day when a movie with an environmental message doesn't suck? This is America in the 21st century, kids. Sometimes all you can do is dream.
‘Ice People’ is packed with plenty of ice, not so many people
A few (green) minutes with Andy Rooney…
Comments
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caniscandida Posted 10:19 pm
29 Nov 2006
(As though, once the sea levels rise, the poor helpless innocent Conservatives will be left to drown while the cheerful conspiratorial immoral Liberals will have acquired all the high ground.)
Cf. the recent news, reported in Grist, of the Florida mega-church evangelical pastor, who was offered a position of high authority among evangelicals, but had to turn it down. He was as committed as The Board in turning a face of flint towards the primary rights-related concerns, abortion and same-sex marriage. But he would have liked to add to the agenda some other big issues: social justice, care for the poor, care for the environment. And that was just too much to ask.
It seems, the evangelicals were not judging those issues on their merits. They were judging them solely with respect to how they would look, among Conservative Christians, and the Conservative talk-show audience. That is: "Liberal" is so horrible, dreadful an epithet, that any self-respecting Conservative Christian will do everything he can to avoid looking like he approves of any cause whatsoever, no matter how virtuous, that is associated by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk with "Liberals."
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lyrivyzy Posted 4:12 am
30 Nov 2006
However, Fern Gully, a hotly debated movie in its time (my elementary school years), was one of my favorites. It had a lot of fanasy and was probably not incredibly accurate as to what might really be happening while logging forests, but I LOVED IT. I watched it over and over and now I'm a thoughtful environmental activist who educates herself on the issues.
So, my point is:
Even if movies like "Happy Feet" enforce stererotypes, at least they exist. Let' be thankful for that.
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caniscandida Posted 7:24 am
30 Nov 2006
You mean: it is a falsehood that storks bring babies? Check! (Or, so I am led to believe.) It is a falsehood that Columbus is a hero? Triple Check! Disgrace to the Roman Catholic Church (he used to pray the Office daily!) and to us Italians, who would be well advised to disavow him, no matter his navigational skills, and push him off on the Catalans and the Portuguese and the Provencals and whoever else may want him.
"Fern Gully" is rather before my time (ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha!) And I never saw it. I believe you. And sympathize. I definitely understand liking a movie that all the world as though in cohoots hates.
E.g., I think I am the only person in the world who liked Bo Derek's "Tarzan, the Ape Man." That scene, by the shore of a central African pond, with poor Miles O'Keefe konked out on the beach, lying there, so helpless, belly-side up, the lamb!, and Bo happens upon him, and touchingly relates to him abs-wise, very slowly, very sensitively, then loin-cloth-wise: etc.: is surely a Hollywood treasure.
With respect to animated stuff, there was a lovely, much-hated thing called "Road to El Dorado," in 2000. Crazy story; very cute guys, daring, dashing, barely within the line of injustice; curious anthropology, with lots of credits to Tikal and Copan and Palenque; some theological imagination; but, of course, nothing racist: needless to say, I loved it.
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kmac Posted 12:32 am
05 Dec 2006
i felt as though "happy feet" had a strong negetive message towards militant and evangelical religious-types - as seen with the elders of the tribe. to me the film said, not only that humans are having a negetive impact on our environment, but that evangelicals are in extreme denial about the state of our world and won't accept non-conformists or changes in our culture and society (which might be so, but does that need to be part of a children's movie?). i agree with yolanda crous when she mentioned "footloose," it was very much like that but even more extreme in its message and packaged as a movie about happy dancing penguins.
"fern gully" did come up in my conversation with my viewing partner (as in the above comments). we both spoke about how we enjoyed the film, but agreed that it was promoted as a film that had an emphasis on our negetive impact on the environment. "happy feet" is being promoted as a happy-go-lucky film about dancing penguins . . . a little misleading . . . i, personally, had no clue about the film having an environmentalist message until i received the "grist list" last week and did some research for myself.
in terms of the environmental message and the cute dancing penguins, i enjoyed "happy feet" ans thought it was very educational. hopefully kids will walk away, at least, planning on cutting their coke can rings. maybe kids will think about the ramifications of polluting. maybe they'll ask questions about the importance of our ecosystem and the damage that is done when it's disrupted. this is all very important. in terms of the other messages that were so blatently obvious, i was disturbed and rather shocked. for the fact that the film is marketed to children who aren't at the development stage where they can truly form thoughts of their own and separate fact from opinion, "happy feet" is extremely misleading.
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caniscandida Posted 3:34 am
05 Dec 2006
It is useful to remember that children are individuals, and react in unique and personal ways to the same stimuli.
The only stereotypish comment that I am prepared to make is that because "Happy Feet" has a "kind of" happy ending, most children are not likely to leave traumatized, no matter what kinds of disturbing or frightening things they saw. I was pretty terrified by the sea leopard scene in the TV preview, in fact; and I do indeed hope that the penguins get away OK.
And whether any of the children comes away with some new environmental sophistication, that would be good, but is in a way incidental. At least the makers of the cartoon feel that they have delivered some important truths in the telling of this story. In that regard their cartoon is far superior to the scientifically minimal "March of the Penguins," beloved by the family-values crowd, which told us little or nothing about the state of Antarctica, and the new added difficulties faced by the emperor penguins and other animals that live there. I hate dissing that movie, because the cinematography is stunning, and must have been achieved only with extreme personal hardship. Really, it would be preferable to re-release the same movie, only with a new and scientifically sophisticated voice-over.
On happy endings: Many parents are leery about showing their small children "Bambi." It is possible that some children are very disturbed by it. In my case, I remember being impressed and fascinated, but not traumatized, probably because the young animals survive everything and grow up. It never occurred to me that Bambi grown up, sporting his antlers and puffing out his chest, was now the most desirable target for hunters in the forest.
And I did not come away with any strong prejudice against hunters. Being a city-dweller, not knowing any hunters, I understood that what hunters did was unnecessary and cruel, and that was that, a judgment of no consequence. But by the same token, I was very fond of Peter Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," in which the hunters are the secondary heroes who restore order, sort of like the "woodsman" in "Little Red Ridinghood." Of course, "Peter and the Wolf" ends with a curious ambiguity: the Wolf is not killed, but captured (by Peter and the Bird), and at Peter's request the hunters transport it to a zoo; and the fate of the poor Duck, still alive in the Wolf's belly, remains uncertain.
On the other hand, one cartoon which really did bother me, precisely because it ended simply in death, with no younger generation rising up to take over, was the sequence of "Fantasia" about the dinosaurs, illustrating Igor Stravinsky's magnificent "Le Sacre du Printemps." (Wow, a Russian classical music synchronicity!) I love dinosaurs, and dinosaurs were my playmates. So, to see them in that final scene, plodding across the desert in search of any remaining water source, all kinds together, one dying after another, was bitterly painful. It made me think more, and more deeply, about death than "Bambi" ever did.
Notice, by the way, the cartoon tradition of showing many animals, of many species, moving together across a landscape, preserved in "Lion King" and "Ice Age": in both cases, much more up-beat.
On hunters again, and human beings killing animals: One of my very favorite feature-length cartoons is "Brother Bear." The religious element, involving the Native American concept of the kinship between humans and animals, is just right.
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Liara Covert Posted 7:33 pm
05 Apr 2007
I have friends who watched Shrek II and became so focused on Pinocchio's hot pink g-string that the rest of the film went right past them. Forget broader messages of things like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and or "a friend in need is a friend indeed." This kind of change of focus reminds us we all have choices. Why is it that you focus on what you do? What do your emotions and preoccupations tell you? Food for thought.
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