the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better”: An environmental discourse analysis of animated films The Lorax (2012) and Tomorrow (2019)
Mohammad Mizan-Rahman
Abstract. Using environmental humanities discourse analysis, this article asks how environmental issues are exhibited in two environmentally focused animated films, The Lorax and Tomorrow, produced in Hollywood (United States) and Dhallywood (Bangladesh), respectively, and how people responded to these films on social media websites. The first part of the article is the analysis of selected social media pages to understand the impact of these two films on contemporary environmental discourse, and the second part comprises an analysis of the environmental narrative of the films. I selected these two films for four reasons: i) they are both environmental educational and pedagogical tools; ii) they use environmental storytelling; iii) they both address sustainability; and iv) they may have influenced some discourse on environmental issues on social media. The study demonstrates that environmentally driven animated films can shape the discourse of their audiences. This study also demonstrates how narratives from films such as The Lorax and Tomorrow can lead an audience to consider large-scale environmental issues.
Mohammad Mizan-Rahman
Status: final response (author comments only)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2022-1452', Anonymous Referee #1, 09 Mar 2023
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2022-1452', Anonymous Referee #2, 22 Mar 2023
This article compares two animated movies with climate themes: The Lorax and Tomorrow. One was produced in the US and released globally, and the other was produced in Bangladesh with a more limited regional/linguistic distribution. The analysis comprised two phases: a comparative thematic discourse analysis of social-media commentary on the films; and, a comparative analysis of the "environmental narratives" presented by the two films, organized according to the themes discovered in the first phase.
The strengths of the article are its attention to environmental media produced outside the Euro-American context; and, the clear and concise style of the prose.
Unfortunately for this reviewer, those strengths never coalesce into a cogent and focused argument. I find 3 major problems with the current analysis (some of which are also noted by RC1):
1. The grounds for comparison between the films are never established. There needs to be a "why" for comparing the films, and that "why" needs to make sense logically *and* be connected to current, exigent problems in the environmental and geoscience communication fields. The "why" we get in the intro is weak: that both are recent animated films with climate-change themes and a robust social-media response. That's insufficient to interest established scholars in the field--and GC readers. A much stronger paper would compare the reception of these two films *in Bangladesh*; then, the differences observed in social-media commentary could be interpreted against a focused, common political background, which leads me to my next point....
2. The "public" in "public reception" is undefined. There are certainly theories of the public sphere that would define a "public" as a group of agents who coalesce around films like Tomorrow or The Lorax, but those theories aren't cited; in fact, no theories of publics are cited (e.g., Habermas, Goodnight, Warner, Asen, Brown, etc.), which is suprising given the theoretical range of works cited here. The author writes, "Solitary public comments on social media may be inconsequential on their own, but together, they are important to understand public reception" (p.8). But without some clear bounding of who that "public" is and what values/goals hold them together, it's impossible to draw any significant conclusions from a study of "public reception." This weakness is the biggest reason why this article does not cohere into an argument.
3. The analytic approach is scattershot. The methods for finding patterns in the data are clear enough (environmental discourse analysis, skip-gram and frequency analysis), but the methods for establishing the *significance* of these patterns is not. As RC1 commented, there is no unified lens of analysis, so the paper reads as a collection of patterns that the author has applied a collection of theories to interpret. A collection is not an argument. The most telling comment here by the author is found on p. 22 when they say, "This paper avoids the debate over the 428 (dis)similarities of environmental ideologies and environmental discourses to focus on empirical findings." An author simply cannot avoid "the debate over the (dis)similarities of environmental ideologies" if they wish to make a coherent argument about the reception of climate-change media--because this reception doesn't take place in an Excel spreadsheet; it takes place in real places, at real times, with real people with real politics.
Based on the interesting topic and the quality of the writing, I have every confidence that this author can generate a more focused comparison with a common ground of comparison and a unified lens, capable of defining its "publics" and drawing conclusions based on the contemporary politics of those publics. From that perspective, this article reads as a preparatory pilot study toward a research article publishable in GC.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2022-1452-RC2
Mohammad Mizan-Rahman
Mohammad Mizan-Rahman
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