That's All Folks?

Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features

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by Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

Type: Essays
Subject: Genre > Animation
Keywords: animation, cartoons, ecology
Publishing date: 2011
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 296 pages
5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches (14.5 x 22 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8032-3512-0

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the authors:
Robin L. Murray is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Joseph K. Heumann is a professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University. They are the coauthors of Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge.

Press Reviews:
"a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on ecocriticism and film." - Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
"show[s] how popular animated films, from Bambi (1942) to Avatar (2009), incorporated and refracted successive American views of ecology: Ellen Swallow Richard's "human ecology," Frederic Clement's "organismic ecology," Aldo Leopold's "land ethic," Eugene Odum's "economic ecology," and the "chaotic ecology" of the present." Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media

As "second-wave" practitioners of eco-criticism, Murray and Heumann aren't much concerned with cheerleading or finding villains. They want to explore how media representations of the environment have responded to various cultural pressures. Observations on Film Art--David Bordwell.

"That's All Folks: Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features gains coherence by tracing a single genre from its origins in the 1930s to the first decade of the 21st centruy... An outstanding chapter on the most recent masterpiece of the genre, Pixar's WALL-E, presents an incisive analysis of a film that somehow manages to modulate eco-tragedy into eco-comedy." Environmental History, Bruce Thompson.

See the publisher website: University of Nebraska Press

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