Plasmatic Nature: Environmentalism and Animated Film

essays Plasmatic Nature: Environmentalism and Animated Film Ursula K. Heise Animation between Technology and Nature Long neglected as an object of serious study, animated film has attracted a great deal of attention over the past decade and a half in a whole range of studies that engage with its history, aesthetics, and politics.1 The astonishing breadth of visual styles that digital animation has made possible (including the crisp photorealism of many wholly imaginary worlds), the engagement with serious historical and political issues, and the global fascination with Japanese anime have no doubt all contributed to this surge of interest. Rather than light entertainment for children, animation now presents itself to the public as a mature visual genre that is able to address issues ranging from war and dis- crimination to technological innovation and environmental crisis. Yet in taking on such topics, animation often manages to preserve the pleasures that come with its distinctive visual styles and with the playfulness, sense of humor, and satiric impulse that have characterized the genre from its beginnings. Its effectiveness as a means of stimulating debate about complex issues results precisely from this combination of serious engagement with a playful style, as recent political shorts on the Internet such as 2007’s The Story of Stuff or the Humane Farming Associa- tion’s 2012 A Cage Is a Cage demonstrate. Animated film is not a genre just for children, as the enormous export of Japa- nese anime to cultures around the world over the past three decades has clearly demonstrated. Japan’s economic dominance in the 1980s triggered a wave of fas- 1. They include Wells 1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2009; Wasko 2001; Napier 2005 [2001]; Furniss 2008; and LaMarre 2009, to identify just a few of the most important works. Public Culture 26:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-2392075 Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press 301 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/26/2 (73)/301/455037/0260301.pdf by GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE LIB user on 21 April 2018 Public Culture cination with a whole range of Japanese cultural practices and genres, anime and the print genre it is often based on, manga, among them. Neither of these genres, which now have an adult audience numbering in the tens of millions across the globe, had ever been primarily intended for children in Japan. In Belgium and in France, likewise, comic books and animated film have had a devoted adult following in the postwar era. From science fiction cult classics such as Otomo Katsuhiro’s 1988 Akira and the often nostalgic feature films of Miyazaki Hayao to Oshii Mamoru’s 2004 Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Japanese animated film has confronted its increasingly global audience with visually compelling and conceptually complex artworks rather than simple cartoons.2 Its newly won popularity helped highlight that, in a variety of countries, animated film and the graphic novels it sometimes draws on had long engaged with serious historical and political issues: for example, Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 Fritz the Cat deals with the American counterculture of the 1960s; Nakazawa Keiji’s はだしのゲン (Hadashi no gen [Barefoot Gen]; manga version, 1973; animated film version, 1983) and Takahata Isao’s 1988 火垂るの墓 (Hotaru no haka [The Grave of the Fireflies]) with the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Garri Bardin’s 1991 Seryi Volk & Krasnaya Shapochka (Gray Wolf and Little Red Rid- ing Hood) with the impending demise of communism; and Marjane Satrapi’s 2007 Persepolis with growing up in postrevolutionary Iran. Contemporary environmental crises figure explicitly in blockbusters such as Miyazaki’s 1997 もののけ姫 (Mononoke hime [Princess Mononoke]) and Andrew Stanton’s 2008 Wall- E and more indirectly in a host of other animated films con- cerned primarily with urban landscapes, futuristic technologies, and processes of modernization and globalization. But the question of humans’ impact on the natural world is by no means limited to such recent films; it has featured prominently in American animated film, especially but not only those of Disney Studios, since the 1930s. Up until the past ten years, however, environmental critics had paid little attention to animated film — Jhan Hochman’s Green Cul- tural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (1998), Gregg Mitman’s Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (2009 [1999]), and Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (2009) do not address the genre — except to complain about “the trouble with Bambi” (Lutts 1992), the sanitized, sentimental, and anthropomorphic por- trayals of nature especially in Disney features. But they have recently investi- 2. I refer to Japanese names in the order in which they normally appear in Japanese, with the family name preceding the given name. 302 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/26/2 (73)/301/455037/0260301.pdf by GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE LIB user on 21 April 2018 gated the genre in far greater depth. Alexander Wilson’s The Culture of Nature: Plasmatic North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1992) and David Nature Ingram’s Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (2000) include brief readings of Disney’s films. Susan Napier’s Anime (2005 [2001]) and Sean Cubitt’s EcoMedia (2005) explore the complexity of Miyazaki’s engagement with environmental destruction in Princess Mononoke, and David Whitley’s The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (2008) delivers the first book- length study of Disney’s portrayal of nature. Murray and Heumann’s That’s All Folks? Eco- critical Readings of American Animated Features (2011) and Deidre M. Pike’s Enviro- Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television (2012) expand this exploration to a wide range of American animated works, documenting the persistent recurrence of ecological concerns in the genre. For the most part, these critical studies focus on how animated films mobi- lize particular cultural templates in portraying nature, how they define humans’ relationship with nonhumans, to what extent they engage with ecological crisis, and what sociopolitical ideologies they criticize or encourage. They construe the relationship between animation and environmentalism, in other words, mostly as a matter of thematic content. In the process, they approach animated film much as they do other works of fiction in film or literature. This perspective has yielded valuable insights and highlighted just how deeply the genre has engaged with environmentalist concerns. But many of the formal characteristics that distin- guish animation from other kinds of film, let alone fiction in other media, get lost in the process. My purpose here is to focus on some of the aesthetic strategies that are particularly distinctive of animation and to show that animated film — the genre that through its techniques sets objects in motion, endows them with agency, and inquires into their “objecthood” — should be understood as the principal aesthetic genre that engages with the reification of nature and its possible alternatives in modern society. The peculiar fascination of the genre lies in its refusal to treat either natural or human- made environments as mere inert materials and in its insistence that these environments are alive and populated by all manner of nonhuman agents. Two strategies that animated film deploys to this end are particularly salient. In all three major types of animated film — traditional cel, stop- motion, and digital animation — nonhuman actors and supernaturally flexible bodies tend to play a prominent role. Nonhuman actors manifest themselves most obviously in the innu- merable thinking and speaking animals that populate animated film, but animated objects are almost equally pervasive in the genre from its earliest beginnings to some of its latest works. If such animals and objects are sometimes transparently 303 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/26/2 (73)/301/455037/0260301.pdf by GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE LIB user on 21 April 2018 Public Culture modeled on human types, they nevertheless open up a world being worked on by nonhuman agents in ways that resonate with environmentalist thought — all the more so if they are not simply presented as humans in another guise but inhabit modes of thought and being all their own. And even in those cases when animals, plants, or objects behave like humans, their bodies quite often do not. Animated bodies, human and nonhuman, are notorious for their seemingly infinite abil- ity to expand, contract, stretch, bulge, flatten, implode, explode, fragment, and yet return to their original shapes, displaying what the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1986) called their characteristic “plasmaticness.” Both of these basic features — the prominence of nonhuman actors and the portrayal of plasmatic bodies — can be understood as engagements with increas- ing mechanization and commodification in twentieth- century societies, as well as with the broader subjection of human, animal, and plant bodies to industrial regimes of categorization and control. Animation emerged as an expressive medium in the 1910s, when industrialization took a new turn with the introduc- tion of standardized time zones, the assembly line, Taylorist monitoring of pro- duction, and a host of new technologies ranging from the X- ray and the movie camera to the automobile and the airplane. These trends toward standardization and mechanization provoked anxious questions about the possible disempower- ment and automatization of the human subject that manifested themselves across a wide range of literary and artistic works: from the Surrealists’ disarticulated mannequins, the Dadaists’ dancing household objects, René Clair’s and Charlie Chaplin’s machinic factory workers, and Aldous Huxley’s bottle- grown assembly- line humans to a wide range of high- modernist authors who sought an alternative realm in the exploration of personal memory, durée, and anticipation.

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