Imagineering an Environmentalist Mind

In The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, David Whitley brings several disciplinary traditions into useful dialogue with one another. This commingling may initially disorient some scholars of children's literature, media studies, and ecocriticism but, given the wealth of confident castigation Whitley believes has dominated academic discourse about Disney media over the course of the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, perhaps disorientation is the state, or space, we need. Maybe then, Whitley suggests, we will stop merely bemoaning the inexorable processes of appropriation and commodification Disney perpetuates and truly grasp the intricate ways in which images of nature are deployed and received in children's film. Whitley's book allows us to consider the possibility that what makes Disney films meaningful to their vast audiences may help intellectuals intervene more forcefully in popular aesthetic spaces.

Given this goal of recuperating a usable Disney past, Whitley argues that Disney films in which natural worlds figure prominently, released during two distinct corporate reigns—those of Walt Disney himself, 1937-67, and Michael Eisner, 1989-2003)—do indeed contain nuance, critical paradox, and reflective consciousness. Among those big-eyed deer, talking moose, and surging waterfalls, there emerge environmental discourses reflecting the decades that spawned them. Whitley complements his chronological organization with a spatial component, grouping the films under consideration by geographical setting: eternal spaces associated with fairy tale adaptations; wild North American pre- and post-contact spaces; and tropical environments. He contends that narratives set in these spaces crystallize significant moments in an evolving popular environmental consciousness. In Whitley's view, to dismiss Disney films as monolithically idealizing or sentimentalizing wild, natural spaces, without respect to time or space, is to miss an opportunity to understand how consciousness of environmental issues has evolved in industrialized nations like Britain and the United States through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

As Whitley offers detailed interpretations of many major Disney films, he appropriates disciplinary vocabulary and scholarship from various subspecialties, pursuing the argument that Disney films compel viewers to care about the worlds they depict in ways both subtle and blatant. He asks if it is possible that "popular art—which tends to simplify problematic issues and to rely on narrative patterns that focus interest on the personalities of the characters and the immediate impact of their actions, rather than more reflective and complex modes of response—could have a role beyond the relatively straightforward transmission of social ideologies in affecting our consciousness" (2). If we grant to Disney's cultural work this expanded role, we might see these popular films as providing "a relatively safe space within which crucial issues could be rehearsed—and even in light forms—explored" (3).

Identifying a transcendent theme of home seeking in the Disney canon, Whitley writes that "the issue of discovering—or remaking—a place that feels like home [often involves] establishing a satisfying and interdependent relationship with nature, and it is here that the genre of pastoral, particularly, comes into play in a number of Disney's early feature films" (8). "Home" and its association with identity, familiarity, and belonging arguably bind all the films considered in this book to one another. Of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Whitley contends that despite the film's dependence on patriarchal gender stereotypes, the Disney workshop deploys pastoral tropes that represent a vision of humans and animals making a home together. Sociability, as defined in Snow White, encompasses diverse creatures. "Snow White's relationship with the animals" who help her clean the dwarves' cottage, Whitley writes, "is founded on a flow of sympathy and a recognition of the equivalence of their respective positions," a recognition which does not elide "a crucial sense of difference between the human heroine and the creatures who surround her" (24). In later films with similar narratives, such as Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1958), animal helpers are deployed as mere background (35, 37). In making such distinctions among Disney films named for their female protagonists, Whitley makes good on his promise to open a...