Plasmatic Nature: Environmentalism and Animated Film

essays

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.

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 concerned 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 portrayals 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.

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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 innumerable 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

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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 ability 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. But they also called up visions of a sometimes disturbingly and sometimes exhilaratingly animated world of matter and machines that seemed ready to fill the vacuum left by the human subject.3 Animation, as historians of the genre have pointed out, is produced through an industrial process involving hundreds of workers, seeks to set inanimate objects in motion through its basic technology, and by way of its themes and aesthetic persistently returns to the organic body’s mechanization and resistance (Bukatman 2012: 164 – 81; Ngai 2005: 89 – 91; Wells 1998: 14 – 15). But if animated film is at its historical root a humorous and often satiric, self- conscious aesthetic engagement with the relationship between body and machine,

3. The Dada and Surrealist movements produced particularly striking examples of such non human agency in their paintings as well as in the short films of Man Ray, Clair, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp, as did Chaplin’s classic Modern Times.

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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 it also persistently confronts questions about what it means to be human, organic, Plasmatic or natural. Thematically, animation from Disney’s 1930s Silly Symphonies series Nature and 1942’s Bambi to Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda’s 2012 The Lorax is as obsessed with the natural world as with machinery. Indeed, the creators of films such as the 1999 Tarzan and 2003’s Finding Nemo each spent months studying the ecosystems they were planning to translate into animation, in an effort at photorealism that is as characteristic of the genre as its blatant fantasies about nature are. But beyond the striking thematic recurrence of nature and even of quasi-environmentalist portrayals of nature threatened by humans, the nonhuman actors and plasmatic bodies of animated film engage with the question of the natural at the level of the genre’s most basic techniques. Speak- ing and acting animals, plants, and objects invite the viewer to see humans as only one of many manifestations of liveliness, intentionality, and agency in the fic- tional worlds of animation, in which human interests and endeavors are often pitted against those of animals, machines, or objects. Plasmatic bodies, both human and nonhuman, might seem to defy environmentalist worries about the fragil- ity of nature, but they also playfully explore ecological adaptation, resilience, and the synthetic, human-made ecologies that define the future of nature in the Anthropocene, the age in which humans transform even the most basic structures of their planet. By questioning how and why we discover agency in nonhumans, how organisms become objects and objects organisms, animated film persistently draws attention to the reification of nature in modern societies and its opposite, the encounter with nature as a realm populated by a variety of nonhuman agents. Even when they are not explicitly environmentalist, animated films often raise these questions through their basic aesthetic strategies.

Animated Nature

In one of the climactic scenes of Miyazaki’s 2001 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chi- hiro no kamikakushi [Spirited Away]), a huge, mysterious, and awe-inspiring guest lumbers into the otherworldly bathhouse where the film’s heroine, a young girl, has found temporary employment. Communicating only with inarticulate grunts, the guest requests a bath, which the establishment’s fearful employees del- egate to their newest and youngest colleague. In the ensuing epic bathing scene, the dirt that the unknown spirit guest wishes to rid himself of turns out to consist of a towering heap of empty bottles and cans, loading pallets, mounds of plastic, a discarded bicycle, and sundry other trash. Not the kind of dirt that would normally encrust itself on a human body, and the guest turns out to be neither human

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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 nor even a run-of-the-mill kind of spirit, but the essence of a heavily polluted river, which flies away in the shape of a sinuous white dragon after its cleansing. As surrounded with the aura of the supernatural as this scene may be, it relies on one of animation’s oldest distinctive characteristics, that of making objects behave and speak in the same way as sentient beings. From Walter Booth’s 1911 short Animated Putty and Walt Disney’s 1932 Flowers and Trees (Silly Sym- phony) to Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 Něco z Alenky (Alice), Jon Lasseter’s three Toy Story films (1995, 1999, 2010), Steven Hillenburg’s contemporary children’s television series SpongeBob SquarePants (started in 1999), and Stanton’s Wall-E, animated film has often featured objects moving, acting, and sometimes speaking of their own volition, including objects offering metacinematic comment on the genre’s own technique of making immobile objects appear to move in cel as well as, quite obviously, stop-motion animation. Miyazaki gives this tradition an environmentalist as well as a mildly humorous twist by having a soiled body of water show up in a bathhouse to be cleansed by — well, water. But in the process, Miyazaki also gives new life to the time-honored literary device of the personification of natural objects. Deities in the ancient myths of a variety of cultures are often, of course, quite transparently personifications of natural processes or objects, and animist forms of spirituality routinely assume that certain objects possess sentience. In modern aesthetics, similar personifications are implicit in the literary device of the apostrophe, which, as Jonathan Culler (1981: 139, 143) has shown, confers upon an inanimate object or force the status of a sentient being at least in principle capable of response (cf. Johnson 1987: 191). John Ruskin, in his treatise Modern Painters (1856), famously condemned what he called the “pathetic fallacy,” the attribution of personhood to birds, flowers, trees, or other dimensions of landscape, soil, or weather. Such attribution is a “fallacy” because, for a philosophical perspective predicated on the assumption that human subjects are fundamentally distinct from animals, plants, and inanimate objects, and that art should truthfully reflect nature, the imaginative leveling of this distinction amounts to a logical category mistake and thereby to bad art. Ruskin’s critique, though it tainted the device, did not deter poets or painters from continuing to use it and indeed to invent new uses for it, particularly in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde’s innovative visual and verbal portrayals of objects and machines. But so long as such creative reimaginings remained underwritten by one form of humanism or another, attributing sentience to animals or objects remained a fallacy, allowable and indeed desirable in the creative arts precisely to the extent that they understood themselves to offer an alternative

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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 to dominant rationalist, empiricist, or simply “commonsense” approaches to the Plasmatic nonhuman world. Nature Environmentalist thought has long been skeptical of these post-Enlightenment assumptions about animism, apostrophe, personification, and the pathetic fallacy. The influential conservationist Aldo Leopold anticipated the urgency of reconceiving the boundaries between human and nonhuman subjecthood when he suggested in his book of essays A Sand County Almanac (1949: 129 – 31) that “thinking like a mountain” was an important condition for understanding the systemic implications of humans’ interventions into nature. In the 1990s, Christo- pher Manes, in an essay titled “Nature and Silence” (1996), criticized the assumption in much Western philosophy, literature, and art that only humans possess language and that this allegedly unique skill endowed them with the right to exploit natural counterparts that were not thought capable of talking back (if he had called the essay “Can the Nonhuman Speak?,” the parallels to postcolonial critique would have been obvious). Neil Evernden, even more incisively, argued that the term pathetic fallacy was itself fallacious precisely because it assumed from the start a separation between humans and their habitats that the environmentalist perspective sought to overcome. “Once we engage in the extension of the boundary of the self into the ‘environment,’ then of course we imbue it with life and can quite properly regard it as animate — it is animate because we are a part of it. And, following from this, all the metaphorical properties so favored by poets make perfect sense: the Pathetic Fallacy is a fallacy only to the ego clencher” (Evernden 1996: 101). By attributing animacy to natural environments through the human presence, Evernden stops short of the more radical conceptual step that recent theorists of “thing-power” and new materialists have taken — the idea that inanimate objects and forces have an agency of their own that is not merely a prosthetic or metaphorical extension of human power. Actor-network theory as elaborated by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law had already explored “hetero geneous” social networks in the 1980s that consisted of both human and nonhuman “actants” relating to each other in both material and semiotic ways. More recently, otherwise quite divergent approaches such as Bill Brown’s (2001) thing theory, Karen Barad’s (2007) agential realism, and Jane Bennett’s (2010) vital materialism have sought to open up new theoretical perspectives on nonhuman agency, often with an emphasis on how agency emerges through relationships rather than as an inherent property. Bennett (2010: viii), for example, asks:

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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 How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? . . . How, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash or “the recycling,” but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially danger- ous matter? What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand? In considering such questions, Bennett (2010: 13) proposes that the ethical goal of her new brand of materialism is to “distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations.” Like Barad’s (2007) concept of “intra-action,” this formulation resonates with the environmentalist emphasis on ecological intercon- nectedness, even though neither theorist is explicitly interested in environmental ethics.4 Animated film, I would suggest, can usefully be understood as an aesthetic framework in which such visions of nonhuman agency have been playfully explored since long before new materialist theories arose. Speaking and acting animals, a staple of animation, seem to be the most obvious manifestation of such visions. Even though they challenge the relegation of nature to silence deplored by Manes, one might object that such animals often all too transparently allegorize human character types or social groups: the neurotic, socially inept protagonist of the 1998 Antz (aptly voiced by Woody Allen), the African American crows of 1941’s Dumbo, or the Latino “Amigos” club of Adé- lie penguins in the 2006 Happy Feet are all easily recognizable human (indeed, US-American) stereotypes. For all that, such allegorical animals are perfectly capable of voicing scathing critiques of human behavior, as the fully anthropomorphic characters of Disney’s Bambi do in portraying humans as killers and destroyers of the forest. But not all animated animal characters can be easily mapped onto human types and social relations. Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, for example, features a wide variety of human, animal, and spirit groups that are as varied and divided among themselves as they are pitted against each other

4. Bennett (2010: 111), in fact, rejects environmentalism in favor of vital materialism, argu- ing that environmentalism casts “animals, vegetables, or minerals . . . as a passive environment or perhaps a recalcitrant context for human action.” Clearly, this judgment relies on a rather limited knowledge of twentieth-century environmentalist thought.

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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 in their struggle over the future of the forest. Some of the animals, such as the Plasmatic bears and wolves, can speak to each other as well as to humans; the protagonist’s Nature clearly intelligent red elk, by contrast, never speaks, but his actions, like those of the forest animals, are readily intelligible from a human perspective. By contrast, the nature and intentions of the shishigami, the elusive spirit of the forest who appears in a deerlike shape by day and in a gelatinous humanoid shape by night, are not understood by either animals or humans. Humanlike intentionality, volition, and agency, therefore, do not automatically provide the template by which to conceive of other kinds of agency, as is even more obvious in experimental animated films such as the Quay Brothers’ 1986 Street of Crocodiles, which features a scene in which a set of screws unscrews itself and performs a kind of dance for no humanly fathomable reason. But even quite resolutely anthropomorphic animal characters can end up put- ting human exceptionalism in question when the film technique foregrounds the gap between their humanlike subjectivities and their nonhuman bodies. The 2009 Belgian film Panique au village by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar (the title has been awkwardly translated into English as A Town Called Panic), for example, which was based on a series of television shorts, relies on stop-motion animation of cheap, mass-produced toy figurines that stand on small plastic rectangles to give them balance. The film focuses on the roommates Cheval, Indien, and Coboy — as their names indicate, a horse, a Native American, and a cow- boy (see fig. 1). Cheval, who owns a computer and drives a minuscule car, is the most Figure 1 Domestic scene featuring Cheval, Coboy, and Indien in Aubier and Patar’s responsible among them and 2009 Panique au village always has to spur the ne’er- do-wells, Indien and Coboy, on to work, out of mischief, and away from the TV. Across the street from them live the (human) farmer Stephen and his (human) wife, Janine, with their farm animals. But in one of the first scenes, still portray-

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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 ing routine life in the village, Stephen calls up Cheval to ask him to pick up the “animals,” whereupon the latter jumps into his car only too eagerly to drive to the music school where the donkey, chickens, and pigs are taking their piano and vio- lin lessons. His eagerness derives from his fondness for the music teacher, Madame Longray — herself a plastic horse with a flaming red mane. After Cheval delivers a sample piano performance in her classroom that she qualifies as “catastrophique,” she gently asks him to consider taking some lessons along with “the animals.” If the category “animal” here does not quite mean what it usually does, it is not simply irrelevant, either. Stephen and Janine do not share their house with the animals as Cheval does with his human roommates. Their animals sleep in a barn, where they also accommodate the three bachelors when the trio’s house collapses. Even then, Cheval as well as Stephen’s cows sleep not by bedding down on hay (as Indien and Coboy do, deprived of their usual beds), but in vertical bed frames with suspended pillows against which they lean their heads for the night. And this is only the beginning of a movie that also features elaborate submarine scenes inhabited by beings with fins that are neither quite fish nor humans in diving suits. As obviously anthropomorphic as most of these highly individualized characters may be, they manage to unsettle the spectator precisely by making it unclear what exactly the categories “human” and “animal” mean in their narrative universe. The film’s visual style reinforces the confusion, since it often plays humorously on the flexibility of plastic figurines that should normally be rigid. The cheap plastic and mass-market manufacture of the figurines makes it impossible for the viewer to forget this vinyl artificiality as the material substrate of the characters’ lively personalities. Indeed, the plastic bodies of human and animal characters in the end stand as signposts to a world in which agency can be human or non human, animate or inanimate: a humorous plastic incarnation of the pathetic fallacy turned into posthuman comedy.

Plasmatic Nature Humans and nonhumans in animated film, as the characters of Panique au village already indicate, tend to share not only sentience and agency but also impossibly dynamic and flexible bodies that assume a variety of shapes in bold defiance of known principles of anatomy, biology, chemistry, and physics. It is this capacity that Eisenstein (1986: 21), in a well-known essay on Disney from 1941, called “plasmaticness”: “For here we have a being represented in drawing, a being of a definite form, a being which has attained a definite appearance, and which behaves like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a ‘stable’ form.” Eisenstein

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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 interpreted this imagination of infinitely flexible biological forms as the symptom Plasmatic “of a society that had completely enslaved nature” (3). But the plasmatic body Nature also offered, in his view, a promise of imaginary escape: “In a country and social order with such a mercilessly standardized and mechanically measured existence, which is difficult to call life, the sight of such ‘omnipotence’ (that is, the ability to become ‘whatever you wish’), cannot but hold a sharp degree of attractiveness” (21). Eisenstein harbored no illusion that Disney’s films were genuinely revolu- tionary (“The revolt is a daydream” [4]), but he did attribute to them an important sociocultural function in holding out a vision of an alternative world. Given the overwhelming social conservatism of many of Disney’s works, contemporary critics have often dismissed Eisenstein’s praise as misguided (Krauss 2000: 14 – 16; Wells 1998: 189 – 90). But others have returned to a more nuanced engagement with plasmaticness. Sianne Ngai (2005: 99 – 101) uses the concept in her exploration of animatedness and race to counter Rey Chow’s (1992: 110 – 15) dystopian emphasis on the relentlessly mechanized body whose automatization is only the outward sign of its complete subjection to powers it cannot control. In a qualified return to Eisenstein, Ngai (2005: 116 – 17) points to moments in literature and film in which the animated body, through apparent chance occur- rences that nevertheless recur systematically, slips out from under the constraints of extreme mechanization and thereby suggests the possibility of inhabiting social roles and the power structures they embody in innovative and liberatory ways. Scott Bukatman returns to Eisenstein even more forcefully. While he agrees with other critics on the ambivalence and the limits of the animated body, he newly emphasizes the “pleasures of the plasmatic,” which, he argues, are more than merely aesthetic (Bukatman 2012: 20). He perceives in animatedness “a fundamental mode of being in the world, or perhaps of positioning oneself just to the side of it. The characters to be encountered here are vital figures possessed of a nearly uncontainable energy, and in this they represent little embodied utopias of disorder” (Bukatman 2012: 22). More emphatically than other critics who see the animated or plasmatic body as always battling with and constrained by the mechanisms of work and of power, Bukatman reemphasizes its pleasurable and utopian dimensions. From an environmentalist perspective, plasmaticness strikingly envisions an escape not only from the social but also from the biological order, an organ- ism “capable of assuming any form . . . which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence” (Eisenstein 1986: 21). For Eisenstein himself, such breaks away from biological realism typically arise in societies that he considered highly oppressive, such as

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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 eighteenth-century Japan or the early twentieth-century United States; in these contexts, biological limits come to metaphorize socioeconomic constraints that plasmatic bodies vigorously challenge. Is animated biology a mere metaphor for social relations, then? Paul Wells (1998: 191) seems to think so when he argues that “the capacity of the animated body to assume any shape or form ironically de-physicalises the body in the corporeal material sense.” But if the supernaturally extended body simply stands as a sign of rebellion and freedom, it is unclear why its persistent bouncing back to its original form would be so funny. Innumerable animated cartoons produced by Disney Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Warner Brothers between the 1930s and the 1950s, for example, centrally feature a relationship between predator and prey: Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse, Sylvester the cat and Tweety the canary, Wile E. Coyote and either Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner. Many of these cartoons have become classics of animation in which ingenious predators devise endless complicated stratagems for catching their prey, only to find traps, devices, and deceptions turning against them, distorting, flattening, or fragmenting their bodies in the most egregious ways. But such contretemps never prevent them from bouncing back to their original shape and taking up the pursuit yet another time. One could argue that these scenes are funny because the social, sexual, or economic predators that cat or coyote symbolize get their comeuppance — but in that case, the plasmaticness would belong to the oppressor rather than the oppressed (it is Wile E. Coyote, not the Roadrunner, who is smashed, impaled, and hurled about by his contraptions). Yet that is not always the case. In Disney’s 1936 Mother Pluto (Silly Symphony), a recently hatched chicken swallows a grasshopper, which, rather than being digested, distends the chicken’s belly horizontally and makes the chicken jump up and down grasshopper fashion until it is forced to spit its prey out again unharmed. Similarly, in the 1934 Peculiar Penguins (Silly Symphony), a penguin inadvertently eats a blowfish that then inflates and deflates her body from within until she vomits him back up, whereupon he walks back to the ocean with an insulted expression on his face. Neither the chicken nor the penguin is symbolically marked as predator or aggressor. Instead, food refuses to be food and stubbornly remains another body with its own agency, in resonance with Bennett’s vision of eating as the encounter of different bodies rather than as ingestion of inert matter. For similar reasons, Tom’s, Sylvester’s, and Wile E. Coy- ote’s hunt is forever prolonged and the ingestion of the prey forever forestalled. Whatever the social allegory at stake may be, both the uncatchable prey and the plasmatic predator signal a nature that stubbornly remains animate in spite of all attempts at turning it into mere matter.

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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 That the plasmatic body here signals a natural world that resists its own reifi- Plasmatic cation does not mean, however, that it can be unproblematically integrated into Nature an environmentalist perspective. Nature’s irrepressible resilience itself seems to make any concern over sustainability or conservation superfluous: if organic bodies survive even the worst impacts and injuries unscathed, any effort to protect or conserve nature is beside the point. Even in the American cartoons from the mid-twentieth century in which plasmatic bodies always return to their original shapes, though, the fact that this resilience has to be foregrounded so often also ends up highlighting just how often it is challenged. And in other kinds of animated film, plasmatic bodies become a much more explicit and complex means of reflecting on adaptation and its limits in the face of environmental pressure. Japanese director Takahata’s 1994 平成狸合戦ぽんぽこ (Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko [literally The Heisei Era War of the Raccoon Dog Called Pon Poko], or Pom Poko) focuses on exactly this question.5 A traditional cel-animated film, Pom Poko describes the struggles of a group of tanuki (a species endemic to Japan that resembles raccoons) to conserve their habitat as they are threatened by the construction of a new Tokyo subdivision. Thoroughly anthropomorphic in their individual and collective behavior, Takahata’s tanuki use as their main weapon the shape- shifting abilities that Japanese folklore has traditionally endowed them with. With a bit of practice, many of them are able to embody objects, plants, and humans to perfection, though only for a limited time, and they use their skills to frighten construction workers and prospective residents, sabotage logging equipment, and attract media attention. But they succeed only in imposing temporary delays, since present-day urban Japanese society, with its heavy cultural investment in visual narrative, theme parks, and artifactual simulations of all kinds, turns out to absorb quite easily what in earlier periods might have appeared to be clear manifestations of supernatural power. In one of the film’s climactic scenes, a spectacular urban parade of figures from Buddhism, folklore, and contemporary culture created by the tanuki loses all its power as a political weapon when a local theme park claims it after the fact as a publicity stunt for its own coming attractions. The most gifted tanuki, rather than influencing the humans’ actions, are in the end forced to assume permanent human shape and reluctantly come to admire humans’ ability to transform themselves and their surroundings — an ability they had previously thought to be a tanuki characteristic. Half humorously and half seri-

5. I have analyzed Pom Poko in its marked contrast to Miyazaki’s understanding of nature (Heise 2008). In the American context, Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick’s 2006 film Over the Hedge addresses similar issues of urban and suburban nature.

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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 ously, Takahata thereby suggests connections that undercut the assumption, cher- ished in Japanese society, that a deep gulf separates contemporary from traditional Japanese culture especially where the role of nature is concerned. Shinto, Bud- dhism, and temples, the film implies, were just premodern versions of the kind of imagination now claimed by theme parks and television. Humans’ creative abilities, however destructive they may be, are mirror images of those attributed to other species such as foxes and tanuki in the past. And the company employees who crowd into the daily commuter trains may be exhausted not so much because of their work but because they are really nonhumans keeping up their human appearance with tremendous effort. Traditional shape-shifting and the plasmaticness of animation, in other words, in the end lead to a Baudrillardesque conception of the contemporary world as pervasive simulation — except that Takahata, unlike Baudrillard, does not presume the premodern world to have been any less inauthentic. Pom Poko gives this emphasis on plasmaticness and simulation an additional twist by presenting the tanuki in at least three visual styles ranging from the realistic to the naively cute so as to insinuate that agency and subjecthood might be questions of perspective rather than essence, in the first place. Even at moments when they are just themselves rather than shape-shifting into some other object or being, the tanuki appear in quite different visual forms. In one style, they appear as more or less realistic canine animals walking on all fours, a shape that they assume typically when they are foraging in the woods, when they are seen by humans, or at the moment of death. In their tribal social life, by contrast, they turn into characters with clear individual markers, walk upright, and wear traditional Japanese clothes. At other times — especially in moments of joy, pleasure, and celebration — the tanuki morph into a third, far more abstract form of representation in which they assume the simple outlines, rounded shapes, and neotenic cuteness of Disney creatures or comic-book animals (see figs. 2 – 4). Other, more marginal modes of representation — tanuki in paintings, drawings, or computer games — help emphasize that any way the spectator sees them on the screen, the tanuki are always part of visual codes that mediate nature in particular ways. Through this surprising and often humorous multiplicity of representational techniques, with switches from one to the other that usually occur within the same scene, animation itself becomes implicated in the art of shape-shifting, as well as in the inauthentic and highly plasmatic culture it portrays. Indeed, as Takahata deploys it, animation is merely the contemporary extension of a plasmatic imagination that has always been part and parcel of Japanese culture. Plasmaticness becomes even more self-referential in the 1987 森の伝説 (Mori no densetsu [Legend of the Forest]), a late film by Tezuka Osamu, the creator of

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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 Astroboy and Kimba the Lion. This little-known Plasmatic work tells the story of a family of flying squirrels Nature under constant attack by loggers and hunters who cut down trees, destroy their nests, and kill them. One male squirrel is so distraught by the shooting death of his mate at the hands of a logger that he commits suicide in such a way that the logger’s tent goes up in flames, killing both logger and squirrel. Following their deaths, fairies and sprites visit the logging manager to persuade him to stop the devas- Figure 2 Takahata’s tanuki in their realistic mode of tation of the forest, which he refuses, squashing them representation in the 1994 film Pom Poko under his boots into amoeba-like fragments. After this apparent victory of environmental destruction, however, plants grow at a supernatural pace and turn the logging equipment into strange vegetable sculp- tures. Tezuka had originally planned four episodes for this film, following the four movements of the Tchaikovsky symphony that inspired the film, but only the first and fourth were completed. The characters’ bodies do not display any particular plasmaticness in this thirty-minute feature Figure 3 Takahata’s tanuki represented anthropomorphically without dialogue. Instead, the drawing style itself in traditional Japanese attire in Pom Poko changes drastically from scene to scene, retrac- ing the history of animation in Japan. Etchings and simple pencil drawings in frame-by-frame juxtapositions gradually acquire the appearance of movement with reference to nineteenth-century animation devices such as the zoetrope and Ead- weard Muybridge’s phenakistoscope (Hotes 2011; see figs. 5 – 7). The characters slowly become more three-dimensional, begin to appear in color, and imitate the styles of famous animators such as Émile Cohl, Winsor McCay, and brothers Max Figure 4 Takahata’s tanuki represented in simplified cartoon and Dave Fleischer (Hotes 2011).6 At the film’s style in Pom Poko

6. I am grateful to the participants of the Environmental Humanities Workshop and the Graphic Narrative Workshop at Stanford University for helping me identify many of the visual allusions in Legend of the Forest. Scott Bukatman highlighted the temporary metamorphosis of one of the flying squirrels into McKay’s Gertie the dinosaur.

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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 Figures 5 – 7 Tezuka’s climactic moment, the male flying squirrel courts the female one with all the imitations of Cohl’s 1908 anthropomorphism, cuteness, perspectival depth, and glowing colors of genuine Fantasmagorie, McCay’s Disney characters, down to the long eyelashes and feminine gestures that ani- 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur, and Disney’s 1942 Bambi mal girlfriends are usually endowed with in Disney’s films. After she is shot and in Legend of the Forest killed, the approach changes again to more two-dimensional angular drawing styles typical of a good deal of Japanese television animation, which displaces the high craft the genre had achieved. Even more emphatically than in Pom Poko, plasmaticness in Legend of the Forest becomes the defining characteristic of animation as a medium that is here deployed to convey the vitality of nature in protest against the reification and destruction of nature often implicit in nar- ratives of social progress. An environmentalist perspective on animated film, as these varied examples show, need not and should not limit itself to those works explicitly concerned with humans’ impact on the natural world. Through its one-hundred- year history in Belgium, Britain, France, Japan, the United States, and, in recent decades, doz- ens of other countries, animation has been the principal aesthetic genre through which industrial societies have reflected on the animatedness of the nonhuman, the inanimate, and the object. In some cases, animation has given rise to vivid portrayals of a natural world shaped by perceptions, agencies, and intentions — of animals, plants, even features of the landscape — some of which resemble those of humans, and some of which remain resolutely alien. In other cases, the genre asks more indirectly what an object is, under what circumstances objects assume a liveliness and some form of agency of their own, and when and how their liveliness and systemic connectedness are stripped away to turn them into mere matter. It is this fundamental, if often playful, exploration of the objectness of objects that makes animated film a crucial medium for thinking about the reification of nature and its consequences — one of which may well be animation itself.

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Ursula K. Heise is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a 2011 Guggenheim fellow. Her books include Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture; 2010). She is currently finishing a book called “Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.”

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