Nature is within Screen’s Reach. A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Environmental Representations in Animated Eco-movies from the 90s and the 2000s Produced in the U.S.A and Japan

The environmnetalization of society through media institutions has acquired a key function to address the urgency of our current environmental crisis. Scholarly research has found pervasive patterns in media products that represent nature as a commodity, as inferior to humans, with attributes strongly associated with women, and as more simplified with time. Academic work has shown that animations in particular have more freedom to diverge from these dominant representations and create alternative narratives of what is nature. Moreover, deviant representations usually come from overlooked cultural backgrounds that are not Western such as Japan. This study aims to compare how is nature represented in animated ecomovies that come from different contexts regarding time and place of production. Thus, this paper has compared ecomovies produced in the U.S.A and Japan from the decades of the 90s and the 2000s, which are Pom Poko (1994) and Ponyo (2008) from Japan; and Pocahontas (1995) and Up (2009) from the U.S.A. For the research methodology, a multimodal analysis that combined Critical Discourse Analysis and Visual Discourse Analysis was used to explore how nature was represented in dominant and/or non-dominant ways. As expected, the findings show there are ideological inconsistencies in how nature’s representations from these ecomovies offer alternative narratives and, at the same time, comply with dominant environmental discourses. These are primarily related to an anthropocentric belief system by which humanity is superior to other forms of life. Therefore, nature was mainly depicted as an object. Moreover, the interpretations of these results have been guided by an ecofeminist perspective. This has associated nature’s dominant representations with discourses that support the master consciousness and the human-nature split by which nature is understood as female regarding its experiences of oppression and domination by men and separated from humanity. Nonetheless, this thesis has also found non-dominant representations, which revolved around nature’s agency, and a nature that is interconnected and queer in its unconventional existence. This was particularly true for the Japanese ecofilms, which presented a more congruent non-dominant representation of nature. Regarding differences in time, the most salient finding relates to a growing simplification of nature, which could be explained by the growing urbanization of our societies that has reduced the nature available to us. Overall, this thesis shows that nature is a multilayered concept differently constructed based on contextual factors. It also serves as a reminder that while dominant discursive and representational practices are pervasive; there is always room to create new narratives, and possibly change what we know about nature, how we understand it, and experience it.