Disney the Treehugger

Via Andrew Sullivan, this article at Treehugger:

It turns out that Snow White was a role model for saving the forest and Walt Disney was a secret environmentalist, inserting subliminal messages into his cartoons. Who knew? According to a recent book by two Cambridge academics, all those years of watching Jungle Book, the Little Mermaid and Bambi (re-runs on that one) have made generations of children more sympathetic to the natural world. Great! Bambi, from 1942, was noted as being particularly influential--the authors think that many of the first green activists may have learned respect for nature by watching it every Saturday afternoon at the movies.

I left a comment to the effect that it makes much more sense (to me, at least) to figure that Disney was building on a long-running thread in American thought that comes ultimately from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the philsophes of the Enlightenment. It's a highly romanticized vision of the wilderness, evident in the work of the Hudson River School and the later Western landscapists (Bierstadt, for example), and the early photographers of the American West (Timothy O'Sullivan comes to mind) -- in fact, that's a thread that runs straight through to Ansel Adams in the twentieth century.



This is not to discount the alternate, Protestant Christian vision of the wilderness as the wellspring of sin -- America has always been a little schizophrenic that way: the Puritans versus Daniel Boone. But it's obvious that Disney was building on the Eden/Noble Savage tradition.

If Bambi inspired baby environmentalists, I suspect it's because it tied into a major strand in the American psyche, not that Disney had the power to sway multitudes.