What Disney doesn't know it knows about climate change
"I'm the village crazy lady—that's my job!"
Disney! Radical agitator! Disruptive cultural critic! Sharp cuts into social commentary!
Lol.
Disney might be the defining cultural behemoth of the last 50 years but it got there with one singular focus: making a whole lotta money. And, you know, that’s fine. That’s capitalism. They’re doing the thing they’re supposed to do. We all know that, so we never really expect anything radical from them anyway - just some good ol’ fashioned storytelling, Disney-magic style. They’re certainly not spearheading any major social movements (apart from that time 100 years ago when they sort of invented animation as we know it) and if modern Disney are following a zeitgeist they’re not doing it because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes them more money. You can’t sell a film about racist crows helping a flying elephant when people are no longer into racist crows. Solution? Simple. Keep the elephant, get rid of the crows. That’s just basic business sense.
So no one is looking to Disney for any kind of scathing cultural critique. Deep cuts? No mate. Live Laugh Love. Now get that Elsa dress on, we’ve got a sing-a-long to get to.
But the last decade has seen three super mainstream, box office whoppers that seem to have something important to say, and I’m not entirely convinced that Disney realise what it’s done.
Let’s start with 2013’s Frozen, Disney’s imagined Scandinavian The Snow Queen Wasn’t A Baddy Really epic that gifted real Stockholm Syndrome to all parents of Gen Alpha kids.
We know the queer reading of this film: ice monarch Elsa represses her lesbionic tendencies by spending her life hiding in her bedroom/closet until she literally cannot anymore, sings a lot that she literally cannot any more, and subsequently gets everyone to accept that she literally cannot anymore via the power of true love. (Let’s not even get to Frozen II’s first time orgasm song Show Yourself. Every inch of me is trembling/But not from the cold OH REALLY ELSA TELL ME MORE).
With a bit of a reach, we can even give it a Marxist shakedown. Elsa throws off the shackles of expectation and repression. Anna rids herself of ideas of class and romance. Elsa is cold. Anna is warm. That’s dialectics, baby! In their respective liberation, the two sisters find their true powers and can work communally to build a better world.
But. But but but. There’s something else going on here.
Elsa’s rage and fear accidentally set off an eternal winter. (Just like Snowpiercer. Basically the same film?!). When she finds out what she’s done, she panics because she can’t fix it. She doesn’t know how to fix it. It all seems too massive and overwhelming. She didn’t realise she had all this power until about five minutes ago and now this? Oh god. Oh no. So she does the sensible thing: shoots the messenger (literally! In the heart! With an ice bolt! Kapow!), slams shut the doors to her safe ice castle, and pretends nothing is happening.
Well.
Then in 2016 came Moana. A teenage girl, soon to be chief of her island, voyages the seas to discover her inner self and save her island from the creeping darkness destroying their crops 🎵 Consider the coconuts! 🎶.
This one is… not hard, guys. An out of control, arrogant, larger than life character wants to manage his insecurities by chasing more power and in his efforts to do so knocks nature out of whack, causing a darkness to destroy the land. This imbalance also means a bunch of sea voyagers dry dock their boats because suddenly the water they’ve existed on for thousands of years is too scary, until our plucky teenage girl discovers who she really is and what she’s capable of, and restores the balance of nature. Bosh. Climate change: done.
What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that’s not what the film was supposed to be about. Director John Musker had got into Polynesian mythology, was bang into the demigod Maui because he’s cool, and thought all this was ripe for the Disney appropriation animation treatment. Apropriamation?
But then something weird happened. Moana, it turned out, was the film that Disney actually took their time over, mostly because they didn’t want to deal with those accusations of cultural appropriation. They spent five years hanging out in the South Pacific talking to people deeply connected to that mythology, and whose islands are rapidly sinking, thanks to sea level rises. What emerged, without conscious intent was Disney does Hiyao Miyazaki’s 1983 classic Naussicaä - Valley of the Wind, but with less self awareness and no giant woodlice: a film in which fear causes humanity to reject their true selves and retreat to civilisation to the detriment of the entire world.
Well well.
And finally in 2021, we were gifted Encanto, in which teenage girl Mirabel tries to accept life as a non-magical person in a magical family, but soon uncovers a bunch of secrets and songs which saves everyone from their worst selves. This, of course, is a film about intergenerational trauma, as is every film currently made for no reason anyone can think of. Absolutely no reason whatsoever. Nope. I got nothing.
But also too as well. The Family Madrigal is granted a miracle — a life of magic and abundance — seemingly with nothing asked in return. But everyone is falling apart - Louisa, for example, is losing her superhuman strength, and Isabella’s ties to industrial agriculture cause her to remain trapped in the expectations and demands of a heteronormative nuclear family when she is clearly a disaster bisexual with designs as a non-binary polyamorous relationship anarchist.
Pepa literally controls the weather with her emotional state but is so perpetually overwhelmed with the stress and anxiety of her siblings and their exploitation that she can’t keep a lid on it. Not even a metaphor 🎵 My tia Pepa/her mood controls the weather image/ When she's unhappy. Well, the temperature gets weird.🎶
Mirabel can see the problems but everyone ignores her - she’s our cartoon Jeff Goldblum, warning of the dangers of an alien invasion/dinosaur cloning/overusing your family’s magical powers - and it’s ultimately her healing that sets in motion the restoration of their home.
But what’s actually going on here? The exploitation of the individuals, overuse of their gifts and prioritising of their labour over their emotional wellbeing is threatening to collapse the only home they know. It’s not until they all learn to care for each other for who they are, not what they have, does the house begin to heal. 🎵The miracle is you, not some gift, just you🎶
Well well well.
The standard critique of Disney goes something like this: while it might be superficially exciting to see explorations of climate change and inequality and fairness emerging in the most mainstream of media, any tiny scratch of the surface sees it fall apart. Yes, love and connection are the things we need. Lord knows I bang on about it enough. But the reason those things are missing in the first place — and what we do once we’ve reclaimed them — are all things that Disney necessarily can’t explore because, well, their very existence depends on that particular bit remaining opaque.
What would the shareholders think if Mirabel’s trauma healing didn’t lead to the poor villagers helping the Madrigals rebuild their lush mansion, but instead caused the dismantling of la familia Madrigal’s latifundista colonial-feudal mini empire and the redistribution of its resources among the village campesinos on whose labour their power ultimately derived? Or if Elsa renounced the hereditary monarchy and Arendelle became a democratic republic? Or if Moana ceded power to an anarcho-syndicalist commune that made decisions based on consensus?
It’s a small problem for the Disney money tree, and no one is going to voluntarily cut the branches they’re sitting on, no matter how diseased they are.
While it’s hard to argue against this point, Disney does seem to have hit upon something else and unwittingly highlighted the very real problem the human world faces.
It’s been a good 30 years since Disney gave us a good antagonist. I’m thinking Ursula (The Little Mermaid, 1989!) or Scar (The Lion King, 1994!). That’s three decades without your classic bad guy. Why? (PSA No I am not including any of the super bad Disney films, straight to videos or Disney Channel Original Movies because just no.)
The reason is this: despite the shareholders, and regardless of financial intent, all the people in the writers’ room are, well, people. They live in the world! Assuming, generously, that they’re not fully paid up members of the Ayn Rand fan club, they’re seeing what so many of us are seeing, and that will be leaking into their stories one way or another.
Writing stories is a meditative process. Magical, or thereabouts. The writer has an idea and goes about constructing it and somehow in the process other ideas that they hadn't consciously thought about sneak in. This space — a liminality of sorts, a place of dark reckoning — is where the true story happens. And here’s the thing that we all know: the real solutions to the problems we face aren’t just about the big tech and the politics, although of course that helps, but with a true reckoning with ourselves. Humanity is its own worst enemy. We are our own antagonist. The problem, annoyingly, lies squarely at our own feet.
In creative writing, we’re taught to create characters whose wants and needs are in direct opposition to each other. This creates a conflict which in turn creates drive and change and story.
In real life, we find ourselves in a terrible bind.
The thing we want is our own true selves, and to find genuine connection with each other.
The thing we need is our own true selves, and to find genuine connection with each other.
And we are wholly unable to do any of it because we are all so broken (because trauma! Because capitalism! Because atomisation!). Our desperate yearning for intimacy manifests as clinginess, toxicity. Our aching need for community as codependence.
Traditionally in a plot we find our resolution when our heroes realise the thing they want is damaging and wrong, and by discarding it discover they can access the thing they need. The promiscuous party animal seeking casual encounters finds love and stability. The loner demanding isolation finds community. The traumatised daughter looking for adventure instead finds the missing part of herself and in turn heals her family.
But how can we resolve our dissonance when the thing we want and need is the same, when neither is bad or wrong in favour of the other, and there is no way of reaching either? How can we reach a state of equilibrium when we are irrevocably at war with ourselves?
We are our own hungry ghosts. Having neglected our ancestors, abandoned our lands, separated from each other and broken the bonds that bind us, we are doomed to haunt ourselves forever, always seeking something we can't name, never able to be sated. And these themes are all there whether Disney realises it or not.
Of course, these ideas aren’t new in fiction. Studio Ghibli did this in the 1980s and 90s, Ursula K LeGuin in the 1960s and 70s.
There are elements of Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea across all these films - our hero having to chase their own shadow and make peace with all that they are. I mean, Moana literally does exactly this on a boat, just like Le Guin’s Ged. We’ve also got spots of Studio Ghibli all over the place, and we can even read some Mary Oliver into this sense of existing within the world as a participant and witness, not an extractor or exploiter.
If Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was the birth of the modern environmental movement, it’s easy to feel like all the interesting ideas have been stuck in the margins for 60 years. And now maybe they’re finally trickling through to the centre, watered down as they are in a kind of half victory, but a victory nevertheless. And if it’s reached Disney then that rush is getting stronger, whether the shareholders like it or not.
FOOTNOTE: I wrote this before I wrote the Barbie review which comes to a slightly different conclusion about capitalism openly critiquing itself and I think both these things can be true at once. Maybe? Possibly? Yes? To the comment section with you!