The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation

From Snow White to WALL-E

David Whitley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317028024
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Animation

In the second edition of The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, David Whitley updates his 2008 book to reflect recent developments in Disney and Disney-Pixar animation such as the apocalyptic tale of earth's failed ecosystem, WALL-E. As Whitley has shown, and Disney's newest films continue to demonstrate, the messages animated films convey about the natural world are of crucial importance to their child viewers. Beginning with Snow White, Whitley examines a wide range of Disney's feature animations, in which images of wild nature are central to the narrative. He challenges the notion that the sentimentality of the Disney aesthetic, an oft-criticized aspect of such films as Bambi, The Jungle Book, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, and Finding Nemo, necessarily prevents audiences from developing a critical awareness of contested environmental issues. On the contrary, even as the films communicate the central ideologies of the times in which they were produced, they also express the ambiguities and tensions that underlie these dominant values. In distinguishing among the effects produced by each film and revealing the diverse ways in which images of nature are mediated, Whitley urges us towards a more complex interpretation of the classic Disney canon and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role popular art plays in shaping the emotions and ideas that are central to contemporary experience.

PART 1
Fairy Tale Adaptations

Chapter 1
Domesticating Nature: Snow White and Fairy Tale Adaptation

‘Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges civilized men to draw a hard and fast line between their own nature and that of other animals.’

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo

Disney’s first animated feature was a landmark film, distinguished both for the richness of its engagement with the forms of wild nature and for the sheer quality of its graphic art. In expanding the Grimm brothers’ spare little narrative of Snow-drop into an eighty-minute feature, Disney poured nature into his animation cells with such profusion, grace and visual delight that the film sets a benchmark against which subsequent achievements may be judged. The story of Snow White is simple enough in outline. The Disney film seems to play down the role of motherhood, which had been such a powerful ingredient in earlier versions of the fairy tale plot. Disney’s version begins with the stepmother queen already established and dominant over Snow White, who appears to have been relegated uncomplainingly to the position of scullery maid in the lower reaches of the castle. Unlike in Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, the young girl and her mother substitute are not portrayed as having any direct interaction at the start of the film. Thereafter the story unfolds along familiar lines: the stepmother’s order to have Snow White murdered at the edge of the forest; Snow White’s escape, eventually finding sanctuary in a forest cottage with the seven dwarves; the witch/ stepmother’s apparently successful attempt to kill her with a poisoned apple; and the young prince arousing her from death-sleep in the glass coffin before taking her as his bride. A number of details have been changed from the Grimm brothers’ version but the most striking single feature of the film’s realization springs from the way in which Snow White is persistently shown surrounded by animals, plants and flowers. From the opening scene in which her movements scrubbing the steps at the castle entrance are subtly echoed by the gestures of attendant white doves, through her courtship by the young prince, gracefully framed with arched branches and hanging tendrils of blossom, to the multiple scenes depicting the sympathetic attention and practical help from her animal friends in the forest, Snow White’s association with the natural world dominates the imagery of the film and this aspect accounts for much of the emotional appeal. To be sure, the pretext for Snow White’s association with nature can be found in the folk tale form itself, where animal helpers feature persistently as guides or magical aids to protagonists whose resilience and good-heartedness are eventually rewarded in the plots. But in the traditional tale such associations are developed in a schematic or functional way. Disney, by contrast, allows the basic motif of the animal helper to be elaborated so extensively that it becomes the heart of the film. In the process the theme of sympathetic nature, which in traditional tales is a narrative function, becomes transformed into a whole mode of being. The effect is a heightening of those feelings of both being in sympathy with and working within nature that are at the centre of the pastoral mode. As in traditional pastoral, the medium that gives lyric shape to these interwoven strands of sympathy is song. Snow White’s song with the animals in the forest clearing, in which musical phrases are picked up and uttered in alternating patterns by the girl and birds, is at the centre of the film, but the keynote songs at the wishing well and at the house while the animals are working also consolidate and extend these core associations.

Although the core values of Snow White are enshrined in a modernized pastoral vision of sympathetic nature however, those values are contested in the film. If we ask what ideas of nature are projected in the film, especially from a child’s point of view, then we are struck immediately by the strength of its contrasts. The film is constructed around a very clear set of oppositions, inspired, no doubt, by its fairy tale origins, but constituting, in effect, a dual, or even polarized, arrangement of qualities in the natural world. These oppositions are organized, of course, around the key figures of Snow White and the Witch/Stepmother. Whereas Snow White is surrounded by a multitude of sympathetic, charming and peaceful animals, the Queen is accompanied by a single raven, which we assume is her ‘familiar’ in her witch role. Where Snow White is depicted mainly in an outside environment with plants, trees, flowers and blossom (Disney had developed his inspiration for Snow White in drawings for the figure of Persephone, goddess of spring, who was the subject for one of the Silly Symphonies in 1934), the Queen is shown mainly in enclosed rooms within the castle – beautifully designed but sterile, devoid of live plants or flowers (Finch, 1995: 136). Where Snow White’s identifying colour is white, associated with light and purity, the Queen’s is black, associated with night and death. Snow White’s positive attitude towards all things is clearly an enhancement of life and its natural energies. But when the Queen is shown outside her castle, even the landscape is different: it is more rocky and barren, living trees are sparse, and we are aware of the dead tree trunks and of strewn branches that appear to be rotting back into the ground. The only animals that manifest themselves in this region are vultures, whose ecological function is the swift processing of dead bodies; just as, we assume, the rats in the lower reaches of the Queen’s castle have picked clean the bodies whose skeletal remains proliferate there.

Some of these oppositions are subtle, but many are stark and it is not difficult to categorize them in a schematic form that emphasizes the structural principle of duality: Images of nature associated with:

Snow White	Queen
Sympathetic	Terrifying
Helpful	Destructive
Pure	Corrupt/poisonous
Charming	Alienating
Ordered	Chaotic
Life enhancing	Death seeking
Growth	Decay
Light	Dark

Yet these stark oppositions do not tell the whole story. Some writers have seen links, as well as strong contrasts, between the figures of Snow White and the Queen. Joyce Thomas, for instance, writing about the Grimms’ version of the story, asserts that the Queen is ‘the dark shadow of Snow White’. Drawing on a Jungian theory of archetypes, she suggests that ‘the shadow represents the personality’s dark aspects and inferiorities which have an emotional, autonomous, and obsessive or possessive quality’ that is experienced as ‘a projection onto another … a replica of one’s own unknown face’ (1989: 73). The shared characteristics of a beauty defined by black hair and red lips, and the competitive battleground within which the Queen construes this shared identity, certainly support a reading in which one figure may be seen as a dark projection of the other. Readings of the Snow White story that draw on this kind of insight have generally been developed psychologically. In particular, the Queen’s role as a mother figure is drawn into sharp and sometimes illuminating focus in a number of recent feminist interpretations. But it is possible to read such archetypal ‘doubling’ in other ways too. Here, I would like to suggest that it may take us further in understanding the starkly polarized views of nature that are projected in the film.

The key episode which encourages viewers towards a perception of polarized views of nature as ‘shadowing’, rather than as simply opposing, each other is undoubtedly the terrifying journey that Snow White undergoes as her initiation into the forest. As Snow White runs away from the glade in which the huntsman reneges, at the last moment, on the Queen’s command to murder the innocent girl, the film rapidly leeches all the colours of its vernal landscape to immerse us in spectral darkness. This darkness is, of course, the Queen’s domain and the experience of the film’s new nightmarish mode constitutes a kind of dramatic paradox; it is as though, in fleeing from the Queen, Snow White is not only entering more deeply into the Queen’s world but has actually internalized its qualities as paranoid terror. In the Grimm brothers’ version of the story, the forest Snow White must traverse is a place of fear; yet the reader is reassured that Snow White is ultimately safe and the forest never loses its objective reality. ‘Then poor Snow-drop wandered along through the wood in great fear; and the wild beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm’ (Grimm, 1977: vol. 1, 130). Within the Disney film, Snow White becomes lost, not just in the forest itself but in her own subjective imagination. Every feature of the natural world that Snow White now perceives is transformed into something alien and threatening. An owl’s eyes stare out of the undergrowth at her in predatory alarm: the eyes of other forest dwellers multiply around her like an inescapable, moving tableau of unseen assailants; even the branches seem to grasp at her, their bony, finger-like structures reminiscent of the evil Queen’s hands when she later transforms herself into the shape of an old hag. The natural forms that Snow White perceives with such alarm in this phantasmagoric vision are a dark version of her delightful forest friends, the animals and birds, as we perceive when light from another clearing finally floods through to reveal their normal aspect. But while she is in this state Snow White’s ‘nature’ is not just linked to the Queen’s: it is subsumed by it.

It is interesting in this respect that Snow White’s recovery of her normal vision is preceded by an episode in which she falls and is temporarily immersed in water. The anthropologist Mircea Eliade has suggested that:

Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the Cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth. Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores – even if only for a moment – the integrity of the dawn of things. (quoted in Douglas, 1984: 161)

Snow White’s recovery from subservience to her ‘shadow’ appears to occur spontaneously, but symbolic associations undoubtedly enrich our perception of this process. Certainly, the easy intimacy of her relationships with the animals when she emerges into the light of the forest glade could be construed as recovering ‘the integrity of the dawn of things’, a dream that has been repeated in different forms in nearly all cultures. If immersion is the human ‘equivalent of death at the cosmic level’, moreover, it suggests that Snow White must pass through the symbolic domain of the Queen in order to regain both her purity and her separation from the Queen’s realm of morbidity. The liminal role played by the water in marking Snow White’s progress is also interesting in another respect. For the film clearly depicts the pool as an area of swamp within the forest, with rotting stumps and aquatic vegetation round its dark margins. Swampland has long been recognized to have particular significance within the overall ecology of the forest and swamps certainly held an intense fascination for Thoreau throughout his lifetime. Thoreau’s feelings on entering a swamp, as he declares in his essay ‘Walking’, were akin to those generated by ‘a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum’ (Knott, 2002: 55). Thoreau often fantasized about literally immersing himself in the swamp. As Knott goes on to observe, the biological richness of the swamp enables it to become a place where Thoreau ‘can “recreate” himself because its teeming vitality suggests the possibility of a vibrant life that Thoreau understood as spiritually as well as physically invigorating, outside the dull and ordered world of the village’ (ibid.). In the Disney film the swamp, although initially a site of terror and revulsion, acts as a transitional zone leading Snow White also to ‘recreate’ the forest in her perceptions – ultimately as a kind of sanctuary. Interestingly, the swamp episode paves the way for Snow White’s engagement with the ‘teeming life’ that fills the forest glade once she has emerged from the water.

If one of the functions fulfilled by Snow White’s immersion ritual is to enable a fuller separation from her shadow image of the Queen, however, we should recognize that this separation may not be complete, for the film bears the hallmarks of other kinds of ‘shadowing’ in the sequences that continue after Snow White’s recovery of her more independent self. The owl’s eyes, for instance, which confront Snow White with such hallucinogenic terror at the start of the dark forest sequence, proliferate in more benign form in the supposedly safe house of the dwarves. The dwarves’ house, though apparently simple and rustic in design, is decorated on nearly every exposed beam and piece of wooden furniture with intricate carvings that largely take the form of forest creatures. Of all the motifs in the dwarves cottage however, it is the image of the owl’s eyes that is repeated most prolifically; the motif occurs at the end of every one of the wooden stair boards, leading up to the dwarves’ bedroom, and at many other points on exposed beams, furniture and the fire surround. It is curious that this figure should have attracted Disney’s animators so persistently that it becomes a virtual leitmotif within the profusion of loving detail they bestowed on the heroine’s foster home environment. For, detached from the bird’s body, this owl mask becomes both attractive and disturbing, reminiscent both of the isolated, inhuman eyes staring terrifyingly from the blank darkness of the forest and of their more appealing embodiment, revealed in the benignly solicitous image of the friendly bird that appears in the forest glade scene afterwards. One suspects a rather wonderful piece of unconscious artistry on the part of the animators here, who have responded to the deeper resonances in the story’s internal dynamics with great subtlety.

The issue of whether there is some connectedness between the seemingly polarized views of nature that structure Snow White is of more than merely formal interest. What is at stake here is a judgement as to whether the symbolic structure of the film affirms one of the master narratives of western modernity – humanity struggling to control nature in an attempt to transcend the natural processes of decay, toxicity, disease and ultimately even death – or whether, even in sentimental form, the film offers glimpses of a more holistic view of the natural world, where such processes may be experienced as integrated within a fuller, more complex ontology. Leo Marx’s blunt distinction between two kinds of pastoralism within American culture ‘ – one that is popular and sentimental, the other imaginative and complex’ (1964: 5) might, indeed, need to be qualified here. Marx suggests that popular forms of sentimental pastoral are essentially of a lower order than their more fully achieved literary counterparts. Sentimental pastoral deals in stereotypes, he opines; it cannot challenge conventional ways of seeing and responding to the world because it is too simplistic to engage audiences at a deeper, more imaginative level. But is this always or necessarily the case? Although Disney’s Snow White is clearly both popular and sentimental, its imagery suggests a more layered and ambiguous consciousness, engaged with archetypes that express inherent contradictions rather than the linear straightforwardness of stereotypes, where good is clearly separated from evil at all levels. As such, I would argue, the film lays claim to embodying elements of the more ‘imaginative and complex’ experience, taken by Marx to be the hallmark of a modern pastoral mode that is socially engaged and emotionally challenging. In terms of the views of nature it encapsulates then, Disney’s first feature may, largely through its imagery, push a ‘popular and sentimental’ mode towards realizing a more ‘imaginative and complex’ vision. But to test the degree to which this may be so, we need to examine more carefully some of the critical objections that have been raised, at times quite stringently, towards the film.

Three main areas of Disney’s Snow White have received critical, and at times intensely pejorative, attention in recent years. Firstly the figure of the evil queen, which began a process of being made more ‘un-natural’ as early as 1819, when the Grimm brothers replaced the biological mother of earlier versions with an estranged stepmother (Zipes, 1988; Warner, 1995), has been taken as expressing patriarchal viewpoints in increasingly intensified forms. The stereotypical roles that are used to dramatize conflict in Disney’s film, it is argued, potently reproduce those limited and distorted images within patriarchal discourse that position women as either innocent angels or destructive demons. As Maria Tatar puts it, ‘what makes Disney’s Snow White difficult to applaud as an example of a liberating fairy tale is precisely the way in which it works too hard to efface any trace of maternal goodwill and to construct an image of feminine evil overpowering in its cinematic depth’ (1992: 232). In a parallel mode, the image of goodness represented through Snow White as a character is often invoked as embodying the opposite extreme. Snow White’s ‘saccharine sweetness’ is taken to disarm young viewers from perceiving her role as exemplar of a stifling mid-century ideal of female conformity. Building on the latter perspective, a third strand of critique holds the film accountable for a sentimental appropriation of the natural world in its elaboration of the spare narrative lines of the fairy tale upon which it is based. This appropriation, it is argued, while designed to delight and entertain young viewers, is anything but innocent in terms of the implied attitudes that are inculcated. This last view is expressed in determined fashion in a recent essay by Patrick Murphy, who suggests Snow White is an example of the way ‘that Disney animation consistently displays static, absolute depictions of both nature and women, rather than just one or the other’ (1995: 120). Jack Zipes is, if anything, even more categorical when he argues that in all Disney’s early films based on fairy tales (Snow White 1937, Cinderella 1950, Sleeping Beauty 1959)

… evil is always associated with female nature out of control … The ultimate message of all three films is that, if you are industrious, pure of heart, and keep your faith in a male god, you will be rewarded. … Wild nature can be tamed, and the depiction of nature in the films reveals to what extent man can arrange everything in harmonious order and in agreeable pastel colors to create the perfect American idyll. (1988: 44–5)

The ‘taming of wild nature’ is thus taken to be co-extensive, in such critiques, with the way plots work to suppress or eliminate the power of female figures. These figures – like the forces of nature that need to be contained – are also construed as fierce, wild or dangerously out of control.

The cultural and ideological work that Disney films perform acquires a particular potency, in terms of this kind of argument, because it takes place primarily within the confines of the home environment where it is viewed as part of a process of domestication. This is especially apparent in Snow White where the heroine, as Byrne and McQuillan point out,

like the rabbits, squirrels and birds, achieves her domestic transformation through her reliance on the body itself. She domesticates the wild animals in the wood through her singing, transforms the neglected cottage with the help of the newly domesticated animals, who use their bodies to perform household tasks in ways that labour-saving machines of 1950s America would achieve. … Snow White even manages to domesticate death itself with a kiss. (1999: 62)

Yet, if one looks at the way the process of domestication is configured in detail, it turns out to be neither as absolute nor as univalent as such an analysis might suggest. Snow White’s relationship with the animals, for instance, is founded on a flow of sympathy and a recognition of equivalence in their respective positions; but this does not eliminate a crucial sense of difference between the human heroine and the creatures who surround her being registered as well. As is the case in the later Bambi (1942), for instance, the animators depict an unusually large number of different animal species within Snow White. Identifiable species that throng to meet the heroine in the forest clearing include deer, rabbit, raccoon, skunk, squirrel, terrapin, owl and bluebird. The respective habitats of these different animals are also clearly indicated, from the semi-aquatic pond domain of the terrapin, through the earth burrows of the rabbits and the dwellings in lower parts of the trees of small mammals, to the fully airborne birds. The degree of both biodiversity and species differentiation that are represented here is unusual within the relatively low mimetic form of animated story. Even today, this aspect is striking and remains distinctive. Also distinctive, indeed possibly unique within the Disney canon, is the restraint that is placed on a fully developed anthropomorphism, imposed by not allowing the animals to speak. Mute animals retain a greater potential for their species integrity – in particular their otherness from human beings – to be retained. This potential is, as we shall see, exploited with more self-conscious political awareness by later animated film-makers such as Hayao Miyazaki and in Dreamworks’ Spirit, but it is present in more limited forms in Disney’s earliest feature. Disney’s Snow White is also notable for the effort that has been made to capture a realistic sense of movement for each of the species depicted. Although this extension of realistic movement to the realm of animals does not go as far as in Bamb...