Rated G for Green

Coming off the surprise success of its Oscar-winning 2005 documentary March of the Penguins, National Geographic Films introduced children to more polar characters last summer in Arctic Tale. The film, which was in the making for 10 years, follows a polar bear and walrus over a decade of their life at the North Pole. The film presents the breathtaking nature footage for which National Geographic is famous, carefully constructed under Queen Latifah’s dark narration about “increasing warmth” making “a demanding world more difficult.”

Arctic Tale, of course, wasn’t the first children’s film to enlist endearing inhabitants of the glacial world in the war against global warming. Movie sequences like this line up in a long string of troubled moments from my childhood: scary hunters burning down Bambi’s forest; irreverent rednecks attempting to shoot Copper, the hound dog’s fox friend; greedy Englishmen chopping down Pocahontas’ trees; and, blackest of all, a possessed logging machine leveling Fern Gully. And that was all long before the penguins arrived in theaters.

Although it’s hardly the only entertainment company to champion environmental issues, Disney is finally getting the credit it deserves for inspiring children to think green. Cambridge English lecturer David Whitley is now calling Disney’s films the “unsung heroes of the green lobby.” Films like Bambi, originally released in 1937, were among the first pieces of popular art to stir up environmental controversy (pro-hunting groups protested Bambi even before it was released).

The intimate relationship between Hollywood and the green crowd has never been a secret: they hold conventions about green messages, and organizations like the Environmental Media Association work to get green talking points into films. The EMA’s stated goal is “weaving environmental messages within entertainment programming and utilizing ‘celebrity’ for positive role modeling.” Awards are presented to the makers of films like Ice Age and FernGully. The group’s founder, Alan F. Horn, is currently the C.O.O. of Warner Brothers Pictures. And everyone knows how willing celebrities are to lend their hands, or faces, to a fashionable cause.
 
But something has changed: the environmental edge in children’s films has grown more aggressive in this age where shallow, carbon-footprint-calculating “lite green” is the new black. I rented a handful of recent kid movies and discovered their plots to be a parade of parsimonious green shoutdowns. No longer do these critter tales have a noble respect for nature, where a poignant story deftly cultivates a healthy reverence for the earth.

Now, propagandized plotlines and explicit dialogue comes right out and tells the four-year-olds—with reams of scientific data and dire prophecy—that no one cares about their happy little tree friends. Somewhere along the way, the whole idea of an enchanting, suspenseful story was replaced by muddled public policy debates and six-pack rings that manage to float all the way to Antarctica.

Examining children’s films from the 1940s to the present reveals the increasing belligerence of the green message in children’s stories. The sort of scenario where human villains invade the sanctuaries of animals and fairies has existed as a literary device since the beginning of storytelling, and, as David Whitley explains, is prominent in Disney’s early animated films.
 

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