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This book explores the transformative power of comedy to help
connect a wider audience to films that explore environmental
concerns and issues. This book offers a space in which to explore
the complex ways environmental comedies present their
eco-arguments. With an organizational structure that reveals the
evolution of both eco-comedy films and theoretical approaches, this
book project aims to fill a gap in ecocinema scholarship. It does
so by exploring three sections arranged to highlight the breadth of
eco-comedy: I. Comic Genres and the Green World: Pastoral,
Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral Visions; II. Laughter, Eco-Heroes,
and Evolutionary Narratives of Consumption; and III. Environmental
Nostalgia, Fuel, and the Carnivalesque. Examining everything from
Hollywood classics, Oscar winners, and animation to independent and
international films, Murray and Heumann exemplify how the use of
comedy can expose and amplify environmental issues to a wider
audience than more traditional ecocinema genres and can help
provide a path towards positive action and change. Ideal for
students and scholars of film studies, ecocriticism, and
environmental studies, especially those with a particular interest
in ecocinema and/or ecocritical readings of popular films.
In Ecocinema in the City, Murray and Heumann argue that urban
ecocinema both reveals and critiques visions of urban
environmentalism. The book emphasizes the increasingly
transformative power of nature in urban settings, explored in both
documentaries and fictional films such as Children Underground,
White Dog, Hatari! and Lives Worth Living. The first two
sections-"Evolutionary Myths Under the City" and "Urban
Eco-trauma"-take more traditional ecocinema approaches and
emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space. The last two
sections-"Urban Nature and Interdependence" and "The Sustainable
City"-however, bring to life the vibrant relationships between
human and nonhuman nature. Ecocinema in the City provides a space
to explore these relationships, revealing how ecocinema shows that
both human and nonhuman nature can interact sustainably and thrive.
In Ecocinema in the City, Murray and Heumann argue that urban
ecocinema both reveals and critiques visions of urban
environmentalism. The book emphasizes the increasingly
transformative power of nature in urban settings, explored in both
documentaries and fictional films such as Children Underground,
White Dog, Hatari! and Lives Worth Living. The first two
sections-"Evolutionary Myths Under the City" and "Urban
Eco-trauma"-take more traditional ecocinema approaches and
emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space. The last two
sections-"Urban Nature and Interdependence" and "The Sustainable
City"-however, bring to life the vibrant relationships between
human and nonhuman nature. Ecocinema in the City provides a space
to explore these relationships, revealing how ecocinema shows that
both human and nonhuman nature can interact sustainably and thrive.
Eco-disasters such as coal-mining accidents, oil spills, and
food-borne diseases appear regularly in the news, making them seem
nearly commonplace. These ecological crises highlight the continual
tensions between human needs and the environmental impact these
needs produce. Contemporary documentaries and feature films explore
environmental-human conflicts by depicting the consequences of our
overconsumption and dependence on nonrenewable energy. Film and
Everyday Eco-disasters examines changing perspectives toward
everyday eco-disasters as reflected in the work of filmmakers from
the silent era forward, with an emphasis on recent films such as
Dead Ahead, an HBO dramatization of the Exxon Valdez disaster;
Total Recall, a science fiction action film highlighting oxygen as
a commodity; The Devil Wears Prada, a comment on the fashion
industry; and Food, Inc., a documentary interrogation of the food
industry. The authors evaluate not only the success of these films
as rhetorical arguments but also their rhetorical strategies. This
interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural,
economic, and literary critiques in articulating an approach to
ecology that points to sustainable development as an alternative to
resource exploitations and their associated everyday eco-disasters.
Godzilla, a traditional natural monster and representation of
cinema's subgenre of natural attack, also provides a cautionary
symbol of the dangerous consequences of mistreating the natural
world-monstrous nature on the attack. Horror films such as Godzilla
invite an exploration of the complexities of a monstrous nature
that humanity both creates and embodies. Robin L. Murray and Joseph
K. Heumann demonstrate how the horror film and its offshoots can
often be understood in relation to a monstrous nature that has
evolved either deliberately or by accident and that generates fear
in humanity as both character and audience. This connection between
fear and the natural world opens up possibilities for ecocritical
readings often missing from research on monstrous nature, the
environment, and the horror film. Organized in relation to four
recurring environmental themes in films that construct nature as a
monster-anthropomorphism, human ecology, evolution, and gendered
landscapes-the authors apply ecocritical perspectives to reveal the
multiple ways nature is constructed as monstrous or in which the
natural world itself constructs monsters. This interdisciplinary
approach to film studies fuses cultural, theological, and
scientific critiques to explore when and why nature becomes
monstrous.
Although some credit the environmental movement of the 1970s, with
its profound impact on children's television programs and movies,
for paving the way for later eco-films, the history of
environmental expression in animated film reaches much further back
in American history, as "That's All Folks?" makes clear.
Countering the view that the contemporary environmental
movement--and the cartoons it influenced--came to life in the
1960s, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann reveal how
environmentalism was already a growing concern in animated films of
the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. From Felix the Cat cartoons to
Disney's beloved "Bambi" to Pixar's "Wall-E" and James Cameron's
"Avatar," this volume shows how animated features with
environmental themes are moneymakers on multiple
levels--particularly as broad-based family entertainment and
conveyors of consumer products. Only Ralph Bakshi's X-rated "Fritz
the Cat" and R-rated "Heavy Traffic" and "Coonskin," with their
violent, dystopic representation of urban environments, avoid this
total immersion in an anti-environmental consumer market.
Showing us enviro-toons in their cultural and historical contexts,
this book offers fresh insights into the changing perceptions of
the relationship between humans and the environment and a new
understanding of environmental and animated cinema.
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