Call of the tame

Parental advisory: Disney’s “Brother Bear” continues a generations-old distortion of the natural world as upbeat and kind.

Sure, Chip and Dale made Donald Duck’s life a waking nightmare, Wile E. Coyote exploded megatons of dynamite in his efforts to nail Road Runner and, yes, ravenous bats did attack the dragonfly messenger in “The Rescuers.”

The disillusioning truth, however, is that when it comes to portraying wildlife, cartoons do not always comport with reality. Yet, they are so influential that when the president of the Sedona, Ariz., Chamber of Commerce drives through the desert in her convertible, she sometimes finds herself blurting: “Beep-beep.”

Speaking from her office on (appropriately enough) Road Runner Road, Chicago native Char Beltran says that long before she ever saw the rocks of Sedona, animated cartoons had chiseled impressions of the landscape into her mind. And while she may not admit it, she, like many tourists, probably finds the landscape curiously dull without coyotes propelled by Acme jet skates careening off cliffs.

Evidence of animation’s fantasy power resurfaces every so often. After this year’s release of the animated feature “Finding Nemo,” children nationwide reportedly liberated their pet fish by flushing them down toilets, and at the peak of Yogi and Boo Boo’s “pic-a-nic”-disrupting rampage through Jellystone Park, more than one Yellowstone tourist is said to have smeared honey on a kid’s face to get his snapshot with a hungry, lovable bear. Even today, visitors to Yellowstone rib park officials with cracks of “Where’s Ranger Smith?” and “Where’s the picnic basket?” says Cheryl Smith, Yellowstone’s deputy chief of public affairs.

Shortly before his death in 1990, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, author of “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,” opined that cartoons “give children the material ... to fantasize and escape from the humdrum of their everyday existence, which isn’t always a very happy one, to a fantasy land that is happier for them.”

Yet Bettelheim saw value in earlier children’s fantasies, such as the Grimm brothers’ tales, which offer far darker views of the wild kingdom than do today’s sanitized features. The latter tend to portray nature as anemic, at best -- pink in tooth and claw.

Example: Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” is a series of sometimes unsettling yarns featuring no-nonsense carnivores, from the human, Mowgli, to Kaa, a python that devours monkeys by the dozen. But in the 1967 animated feature, predatory instincts made way for showbiz, with Baloo the bear, panther Bagheera and Kaa singing, clowning and dancing across the friendly landscape. At one point in the movie’s creation, renowned animator Milt Kahl grumbled, “We could call the picture ‘The Call of the Tame.’ ”

Likewise, in the 1999 movie “Tarzan,” the ape man slays a leopard that has attacked his ape family -- but he doesn’t hunt animals for food or clothing, apparently finding all the loincloths he needs at the Serengeti Mall.

And though “The Lion King” (1994) offers a well-observed vision of African wildlife, Simba grows into an adult lion on a crash diet, eschewing writhing gazelles for bugs and grubs.

Likewise, the scene in which thousands of stampeding wildebeests trample Simba’s father worried filmmakers, who thought it might prove too powerful. “There was a great deal of arguing over whether the image of the dead Mufasa was too dramatic for the animated medium, whether the audience should see the body, whether it would be too much for the viewers, even though there wasn’t any blood,” says Andreas Deja, one of the movie’s animators. “They finally decided that the audience had to see Mufasa’s body for his death to have the necessary impact.”

Other animated films have portrayed animals as truly beastly: The attack of the enraged grizzly in 1981’s “The Fox and the Hound” enlivens an otherwise dull film, and Belle’s flight in “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) from a pack of wolves in a snowy forest scared more than one child. But generally cartoons turn hostile only when a character enters the outdoors to hunt, camp or picnic -- think hordes of ants carrying off Donald Duck’s lunch and Spike the bee dive-bombing his plump rear end. Even Elmer Fudd, who is forever admonishing the audience, “Be ve-wy, ve-wy quiet: I’m hunting wabbits!” is invariably humiliated by Bugs Bunny.

The tradition of using animals to expose human excess and folly dates back at least to Aesop and Aristophanes. It’s a distancing mechanism that allows for exaggeration: No human could stiffen and fall end over end, the way Flower the skunk does when he’s kissed for the first time in 1942’s “Bambi,” and the tantrums Donald throws when Chip and Dale outfox him eclipse even the fits tossed by pro basketball and football coaches.

When a human appears in an undisturbed animated setting, it usually means trouble for the animals. The sneering Clayton in “Tarzan” shoots or traps every animal he sees, including Tarzan’s ape family. The cavalrymen in DreamWorks’ “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron” (2002) treat the wild horses as a resource to be exploited, and in Disney’s “The Rescuers Down Under” (1990), a koala captured by McLeach tells a frantic, caged lizard, “Oh, you’ll leave, all right -- as a nice lady’s handbag!”

No animated film has depicted mankind’s destructive tendencies more powerfully than “Bambi.” A human, never seen on screen, shoots a terrified hen pheasant, kills Bambi’s mother, looses the pack of dogs that attacks Faline, Bambi’s intended, and inadvertently sets a devastating forest fire.

The late Marc Davis, who did key story work and animation on the film, has complained, “I felt personally that it was a very one-sided picture, because man is all bad, and the animals, with a couple of exceptions, are all good. The picture lost a little for that one-sided portrait. I’m not sure you’d want the owl eating live mice in that kind of film, but the only enemy of the wild creatures was man and man alone. I think it was a statement that Walt wanted to make about protecting our wildlife before that was a popular position.”

“Brother Bear” continues the meek-over of nature. Set in a mythical time when “man and nature lived side by side,” it tells the story of a young man named Kenai who kills a bear out of anger, rather than necessity (off screen, of course). The Great Spirits are angered and Kenai is punished.

But animated films that try to make statements about protecting wildlife can wind up confusing audiences. In “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” (1992), an evil spirit called Hexxus creates and spreads pollution. Zak, the logger-hero, inadvertently frees Hexxus, then joins with the resident fairies to imprison him with life-affirming magic. Viewers, especially young ones, could leave the theater believing that forests are dying because of an oily monster, rather than wasteful human actions.

Oscar-winning Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki offers a different view in “Princess Mononoke” (1997). In that film, the citizens of Lady Eboshi’s Iron Town aren’t trying to destroy the surrounding forests, they’re just using the resources at their disposal. Even Jigo, the renegade priest who kills the Deer God -- the embodiment of the continuous cycle of life and death -- is not a screeching bad guy but a petty con man, unaware of the gravity of his sacrilege. Miyazaki says, “It’s easy to create a villain who’s a maniacal real estate developer, then kill him and have a happy ending. But what if a really good person becomes a real estate developer?”

Canadian artist Frederic Back expanded the relationship between man and nature in his award-winning, ecologically themed shorts “Tout-Rien” (“All-Nothing,” 1980), “Crac!” (1981), “The Man Who Planted Trees” (1987) and “The Mighty River” (1993). In the poetic “Tout-Rien,” man abandons his place in the web of creation to build an artificial environment that is as alienating as it is unsatisfying. When he realizes the error of his ways, he joins the animals and birds in a sequence that suggests a Chagall painting in motion. In “The Mighty River” he contrasts the reverence with which Native Americans approached the St. Lawrence River to the exploitation practiced by European colonists.

“It’s true that humans are usually portrayed as invaders, but they usually have been destroyers,” says Stuart Sumida, professor of biology at Cal State San Bernardino. “Animation has the power to show there can be other scenarios, and an opportunity to do things differently. In Frederic Back’s films, nature becomes a character. When he shows the forests created by the hero of ‘The Man Who Planted Trees,’ you feel yourself choking up. He creates that strong an emotional connection.”

Yet an art form that veers between the saccharine and satirical could not be expected to leave unremarked-upon such scenes as the one in “Bambi” in which the owl lets bunnies frolic beneath its perch. In an episode of “The Simpsons,” Lisa chats sweetly with a cute chipmunk and then walks away, never anticipating the owl that swoops down and carries off “Mr. Chipmunk” in its bloody claws.

The lampooning may please those who see milquetoast filmmakers as pandering to the plush-toy market. But author and naturalist Michael Modzelewski (“Inside Passage: Living With Killer Whales, Bald Eagles, and Kwakiutl Indians”) finds a positive payoff in the schmaltz. “There’s a big gap between what’s portrayed in an animated film [and what’s shown in] a documentary about the food chain -- probably because they don’t want kids to get upset about Timmy the Turtle dying,” he says. “Despite that tendency to romanticize, I think the strength of animation is that it can create sympathy and empathy for animals.”

Modzelewski argues that the portrait of nature in some animated films may be more realistic than people realize. “The idea of a brotherhood shared by all creatures strikes a chord in the human heart, and I think animated films can show that. I’ve seen bears up in Alaska sitting on their butts, staring at the colors of a sunset. Maybe they’re just looking in that direction. But sometimes I wonder if by making animals intelligent and magical in their own way, animated films aren’t reporting the truth in a way no documentary can.”

Charles Solomon writes about animation for the Los Angeles Times and other publications.