For example, Molly Moo Cow and the Butterflies (1935), pits a butterfly collector against Molly, a cow who loves the insects’ company. The second concern revealed by the cartoons under study was interdependence between humans and nature. Shooting in stark black-and-white, Otto Messmer, the cartoon’s director, “never let his audience forget that Felix was as artificial as his environment.” Even large-scale productions such as Disney’s Bambi (1942) touched on this point, presenting “ an animated world in which the culture of humans and nonhuman nature remain in conflict.” Nature was always going to be more powerful. First, there was “the power of nature over the human world.” A still from April Maze, 1930 via Wikimedia Commonsįor instance, April Maze, a cartoon from 1930 featuring the character Felix the Cat, seemed to “anticipate New Deal programs that saw nature as a powerful force needing both respect and taming.” As Felix and his family try to enjoy a picnic, “they are thwarted each time by ferocious storms that leave Felix and family drenched and scared.” In studying more than 500 cartoons from that earlier era, they found that the subtle, yet powerful, messages in them reflected three major patterns. While the more visible environmental movements of the 1960s and ’70s gave rise to animation that explicitly critiqued how humans interacted with the environment, for the “enviro-toons” created circa 1930–1950, “environmental devastation and negative consequences of progress served as comic plot devices rather than a cultural critique…neither the cartoon directors nor their studios overtly intended that the cartoons convey ecological messages,” explain Murray and Heumann. As Felix and his family try to enjoy a picnic, “they are thwarted each time by ferocious storms that leave Felix and family drenched and scared.”
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