The FernGully Effect
When Avatar came out in 2009, it shattered box-office records. And even though it was billed as a sci-fi epic featuring blue aliens on a far-away moon, the movie didn’t shy away from a pretty Earth-based message of environmental conservation.
So, with a third Avatar hitting theaters this weekend, we were inspired to bust out the popcorn, dim the lights, and play the part of pop culture critics.
How do movies – from blockbusters to documentaries to Disney films – shape our conception of the natural world?
Featuring Alyssa Vitale, David Whitley, Salma Monani, and Erin Trahan.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
In order of appearance, here’s a list of the movies that show up in this episode…
“Avatar” (2009)
“Oppenheimer” (2023)
“A River Runs Through It” (1992)
“Planet Earth” (2006, series)
“Yellowstone” (2018, series)
“Godzilla” (1954)
“The Revenant” (2015)
“Castaway” (2000)
“Bambi” (1942)
“FernGully: The Last Rainforest” (1992)
“Moana” (2016)
“Finding Nemo” (2003)
“Princess Mononoke” (1997)
“Spring Forward” (1999)
“Into the Great Solitude” (1987)
“An Inconvenient Truth” (2006)
“The Day After Tomorrow” (2004)
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012)
Similar to Avatar, the animation required to pull off Finding Nemo was a technological feat for its time. Here’s a documentary showing you behind the scenes.
Listen to all of “Little April Showers” (that catchy tune from Bambi) here.
You can find Alyssa Vitale’s movie reviews on her Youtube channel, Mainely Movies.
Salma Monani’s academic work within ecocinema extends far beyond that of FernGully. Her faculty page at Gettysburg College can be found here.
Find some of Erin Trahan’s recent work on her website, including a recent documentary following Michael Dukakis.
You can find David Whitley’s book on Disney animation here.
SUPPORT
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Marina Henke
Mixed by Marina Henke
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by BlueDot Sessions, El Flaco Collective, and bomull.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi here with Marina Henke. Hey, Marina.
Marina Henke: Hello, Nate. Today, I want to bring you back to a year far, far away 2009, when a very popular movie hit the big screen.
CLIP: We'd like to talk to you about a fresh start on a new world. You'd be making a difference.
Marina Henke: We're talking blue people, a moon planet far, far away, and a precious resource not so subtly called Unobtainium. Real softball question. Nate Hagee, what movie is that?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, this is Avatar. I have very, very distinct memories of watching this with my entire extended family. I remember being really crazy. The special effects. I was blown away, grandma. Not blown away. Me very blown away.
(mux in, Blue Dot, Plataz)
Marina Henke: So for folks who have not watched Avatar, we've got this former marine, Jake Sully. He is sent to this faraway moon planet to help his fellow humans extract this very precious resource. The problem is that they gotta get it from the Na'vi, an indigenous tribe. Of course. Surprise, surprise. Jake falls in love with one of the Na'vi and decides to lead the rebellion. And to your point, I mean, it is a total technological feat when this movie comes out. There were camera systems that were specially designed to make Avatar happen.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Marina Henke: 100% paid off. Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time. Avengers, it comes in at number two. But Nate, do you want to guess what the third most highest grossing movie is of all time?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it's Titanic.
Marina Henke: It's Avatar 2.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it's Avatar 2! Of course it is.
[swell mux]
Nate Hegyi: So do you think that Avatar 3, do you think it's gonna take that mantle?
Marina Henke: I am not convinced we'll have our Outside/In movie people weigh in on that one, but it is true. A third Avatar movie is coming out this weekend. It's going to be released on December 19th. And you know, even though the whole franchise clearly marked as a sci fi movie, I mean, it happens on a planet of blue people. It is pretty clearly an allegory to life on planet Earth. We've got greedy government trying to get a resource eradicating this indigenous population complex ecosystem, and hearing about Avatar in the ether again, it really did just get me thinking how are movies shaping our ideas about nature?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, no, they absolutely, they form the fabric of your your worldview. I mean, all kind of pop culture does. I think.
Marina Henke: You know, it's funny, right? Movies are something that we literally often see in pitch black, dark indoor rooms. But I think that when we're sitting down and we're watching them so often, it is movies that are shot in the outdoors.
Nate Hegyi: Absolutely. That's what makes them so exciting. You know, when you see Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy is walking through this vast desert of New Mexico and it's just beautiful shots, you're like, I want to go to New Mexico. That looks gorgeous.
Marina Henke: Maybe some people are like, I don't know if I want to be where Oppenheimer is about to do all this stuff.
Nate Hegyi: No, I want to go. I want to go.Uh, you know before the bomb drops.
[mux in, Le Loft, El Flaco Collective]
Nate Hegyi: When it comes to movies, nature is often the backdrop, the setting against which the actual plot happens.
Marina Henke: But sometimes the role of nature is much more obvious. It leaps into the foreground and acts almost like a main character.
Nate Hegyi: So today, on Outside In, how do movies from blockbusters to documentaries to Disney films, shape our conception of the natural world.
Marina Henke: And action!! Oh, I mean cut, I mean cut.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, yeah. Cut. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna get rolling after the break.
CLIP: Hello, Bambi.
CLIP: Hold on. Jack, are you suggesting these weather anomalies are going to continue?
CLIP: Fireeeee!!!
AD BREAK
Marina Henke: All right, we are back. I'm Marina Henke.
Nate Hegyi: I'm Nate Hegyi.
Marina Henke: And today we're talking about how nature shows up on the big screen. Um, Nate, I am excited to talk to you about this, because if listeners don't know, you are a huge movie buff. Uh, were you born a movie person?
Nate Hegyi: Uh, I used to be, like many little kids, the kind of child that would watch the same movie over and over and over and over again. Jurassic Park, obviously, my sister used to watch a movie called Thomasina about a cat, and I can still remember the song. Thomasin, don't ever run away.
CLIP: Thomasina, don't ever run awayyyyy!
Marina Henke: Well, I, uh, have not seen a whole bunch of movies. And to prepare myself for this episode, I went on somewhat of a, I dare say, a cinematic journey, talked to a lot of people who are way more into movies than me. The first person that I want to introduce you to is someone named Alyssa Vitale.
Alyssa Vitale: I am a film critic in Maine and I am also a college biology instructor.
Marina Henke: So I will say Alyssa immediately confirmed every single stereotype I have about film critics. She's got a little a little notebook that she writes in.
Alyssa Vitale: I've kind of perfected the art of not looking at all.
Marina Henke: She's got a routine at her local movie theater.
Alyssa Vitale: I rarely get snacks, actually.
Marina Henke: And a pretty unrelenting schedule.
Alyssa Vitale: I'm watching at least one movie every day, just at home.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Marina Henke: I came to Alyssa with a very specific question. What are the classic nature tropes that she sees in movies? And she had some immediate thoughts.
Alyssa Vitale: There's a lot that are just saying that, like nature is this, this beautiful thing.
Marina Henke: So for me, this immediately brings to mind a movie like A River Runs Through It on the documentary side, like Planet Earth.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, I think of like the show Yellowstone.
Marina Henke: And we've done a whole episode on that on Outside/In. In fact, Nate has.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Marina Henke: And then, of course, there's the flip side of that trope.
Alyssa Vitale: Nature as an antagonist, especially in like, eco horror movies.
Nate Hegyi: Mhm.
Marina Henke: Alice's example here is an oldie but a goodie.
CLIP: It's alive. A gigantic beast stalking the Earth.
Nate Hegyi: Is that Godzilla?
Marina Henke: That is Godzilla.
Nate Hegyi: That's another one of those, like VHS. I can remember watching over and over and over. I had like a box set of really old Japanese Godzilla movies that we would just, like, watch.
Marina Henke: And it really is totally a movie about nature taking revenge on humanity. There's a ton of other classics within this trope. I can think of jaws, Anaconda, Hitchcock's The Birds, but, you know, beyond these in-your-face classics. I wanted to zoom in on just this one niche category within nature as antagonist movies that I do feel you just can't ignore. If we're going to talk movies and that is the man v wild movie.
CLIP: Willllson! I'm sorry!
Marina Henke: This is, I think, a very common idea. We have this lone character who is up against nature. Maybe they're on a desert island alone. Maybe they're trying to get through a really long winter. Do you tend to like those movies?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Sorry, but who doesn't like it? Come on. Castaway, the revenant.
Marina Henke: Oh, okay. I'm glad you brought up The Revenant. Um, I watched that movie for this episode. For people who haven't seen it. We got Leonardo DiCaprio. He's playing this fur trapper named Hugh Glass who is horribly mauled by a bear and left for, presumably dead by his fur trapping team.
CLIP: What happened? We did what we had to do.
Marina Henke: I gotta say, my clip options are very limited.
Nate Hegyi: Just play the one where he's going “ahhhhh!” That's all that movie is is just him yelling, you know so.
Marina Henke: Well. It is. The movie is half Leonardo DiCaprio grunting through the rugged wilderness.
[GRUNTING/BEAR SNUFFLING CLIP]
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly.
Marina Henke: Which, I mean, I think. Nate, how would you describe the experience of watching this movie?
Nate Hegyi: So, like, I remember seeing The Revenant in a theater when I was living in Montana on a cold winter night, and I was like, this movie is just stunning. I'm getting all the chills. The music swells, the views are beautiful. I just know that I was swept up in the vibes.
Marina Henke: Well, one fun fact that I will offer the director, this guy named Alejandro Inarritu. He wanted to shoot in natural light as much as possible. So there's actually only a singular scene that has any unnatural lighting in it.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Marina Henke: But it meant, I mean, a very in nature experience for the crew. They were constantly waiting for the moon to be in the right place for the sun to come through the trees at the right moment.
Nate Hegyi: That'd be so fun to be on that set.
Marina Henke: It's not too late to leave your job.
Nate Hegyi: Nate, I know I might, I might.
[mux in, Blue Dot, Cach PKL]
Marina Henke: So Alyssa has an idea of why these movies are so popular.
Alyssa Vitale: I think a big part of it is we like to root for the underdog. And I guess in a situation where you have the entire, like all of nature against somebody, the human in that circumstance kind of becomes the underdog.
Marina Henke: What I want to add here is like that underdog, it almost always survives.
Nate Hegyi: It would be so lame if they just died at the end. Like, how bad would it have been if Leonardo DiCaprio is just like he just gets mauled to death by a bear?
Marina Henke: Okay, well, then I have a question for you with that, Nate, which is what do you think, then, that this type of movie does to shape our view of nature?
Nate Hegyi: Well, you can spin it two ways. You could say that for some it makes nature seem brutal, dangerous, evil. For others, it would be. Nature is brutal. It can kill you. You've got to respect it. Because if you aren't prepared or if you find yourself in a dangerous situation, you got to kind of figure it out. Which is also true. People do get lost in the woods. People struggle with hypothermia. Wild country is wild for a reason. But I think that, you know, it really depends on who's watching it and like what your experience is outdoors. You know, what kind of experiences you've had.
Marina Henke: Yeah. I also think, like, I know that I get a little dopamine hit when I watch these man v wild movies. Yeah, I do notice that what it makes me feel is like, all I want is for Leonardo DiCaprio to get out of the wilderness. Or, you know, when I'm watching Tom Hanks in Castaway, all I want is for him to get off the island. Like I feel like it's often cultivating in me this repulsion towards nature, which I don't really want to cultivate in lots of movies.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, but they're also not like on a maintained trail, just feeling like a little lost, you know, I don't know. I mean, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. It's that other flipside of nature as evil, nature as dangerous. Nature is something to be afraid of when it's obviously a lot more complicated than that.
(mux in, Dognell)
Marina Henke: Okay, so after looking at the ‘nature as antagonist’ trope, I think it makes sense to look at the total opposite… nature as beautiful, idyllic, pristine even. Soooo...
CLIP: Walt Disney, the world's greatest storyteller, brings the world's greatest love story to the screen.
Marina Henke: There is no better case for this than the world of early Disney animation.
CLIP: Bambi, the story that proves that love can be loaded with laughs.
Marina Henke: Well, Nate, even if you haven't heard the phrase, what does the word disneyfication evoke for you?
Nate Hegyi: Big eyes. Animals with huge eyes.
Marina Henke: That speaks truly volumes. So this is a term that is thrown around by sociologists and culture critics, and it's the idea of portraying nature in the most simplified, safe, harmonious view as possible. Bambi, which comes out in 1942, is the master class of this, arguably creating, I think, probably the most popular real fake forest on the big screen for this generation. I talked to this guy he's named David Whitley. He spent his whole career at Cambridge studying children's film, and he wrote a book called The Idea of Nature In Disney Animation.
David Whitley: Disney has overarching, very optimistic sorts of plots. I think it looks for spaces within nature which are in harmony. It's a very old sort of idea, really.
Marina Henke: You know, it's a great example of this. Listen to this shot of a song in Bambi. It's called Little April Showers.
CLIP: Little April shower. Beating a tune as you fall all around. Drip, drip drop. Little April shower. What can compare with your view?
David Whitley: One of the things that it did, I think, was to take the fast moving gag of the cartoon, the energy of it, and keep some of it, but put it into something which was like a full blown drama or melodrama often, and to allow a kind of depth of feeling in there.
Marina Henke: And what he explained to me is that this idea, this disneyfication, it tends to bother a lot of critics.
David Whitley: The assumption was that Disney was a realm of enchantment for children, something whose sentimentality and optimism were false things.
Marina Henke: There is actually something to this criticism. I'm going to give you the, I think, best example I came across for this when frozen came out, much more recent animated film, a US special representative to the Arctic reached out to the Disney folks and they said, can we make educational clips using these Disney characters to let children know about the dangers of climate change affecting the Arctic? You know, Disney sai?
Nate Hegyi: Nope!!
Marina Henke: Exactly. They said we tell stories with happy endings, and we don't want our characters to be part of this narrative of something that is pretty not happy.
Nate Hegyi: Wow. That's pretty, uh, it's pretty telling. Also, just for the current political climate and how Disney is, uh, interacting with that political climate makes a lot of sense to me.
Marina Henke: Yeah, it is why you will not find, uh, you know, images of Elsa and Olaf on melting ice caps anywhere near you.
Nate Hegyi: Just floating on a single iceberg, clinging on to life.
Marina Henke: And, you know, the critique here is that movies that are just choosing to show this optimism, that it is not showing a realistic view of nature, like, I feel like it's almost like nature misinformation.
Nate Hegyi: Well, okay, so, you know, let's give Bambi some credit. 1942 you know, this is an era where we've got black beauty, you've got Bambi, like different era of a shift in how we're looking at wild places.
Marina Henke: And, you know, while you could look at these harmonious ecosystems in Bambi and roll your eyes. David says that children's animated films do introduce thornier themes about nature. This is where I got to ask you, Nate, what is your relationship to the movie FernGully?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, it was a movie that I watched again, probably every day after school for months, if not years.
CLIP: Deep in the heart of the forest there is a magical world where wondrous creatures play the day away.
Nate Hegyi: It's been a very long time since I've seen it. I just remember the bat flying around and the giant smoke monster that also drove some sort of logging truck.
Marina Henke: Your childhood memory does serve us correctly. We've got this magical world of fairies in this rainforest. Very comical bat named Batty, and this evil timber company that is trying to cut them all down. The villain, literally a dark blob of pollution. Who? I don't know if you remember this. Voiced by Tim Curry. He has a song in the movie called Toxic Love.
CLIP: I'm gonna crush and grind all creatures great and small. And put up in parking lots and shiny shopping malls.
Marina Henke: Clearly on the nose we are talking about the environment there. Small aside, very similar plot to Avatar, if you think about it.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Totally is. But it is. It's like a very simplistic idea of how we as people interact with nature, right? It's like timber companies bad in Bambi, hunters bad. Pretty much human beings destroy the pristine ness of nature and kind of ignoring the fact that human beings have been interacting and are a part of nature and have been a part of nature for tens of thousands of years. I don't know, but for a child, for an eight year old, I was like, yeah, logging is bad.
Marina Henke: Well, I hate to break the news to you, but you are not the only 90s child to have thought that.
Salma Monani: When I asked my students, what are the films that that they think of when they think environmental films. They say FernGully.
Marina Henke: This is Salma Monani. She's an environmental studies professor at Gettysburg College who focuses on eco cinema, which is like an entire discipline that is just looking at films through the environment. And for years, she used to hear the same, very similar reflection from her students on this very movie.
Salma Monani: When I was a child, I really, really watched this film and I loved it. It really made me sort of think about the environment in a different way.
Marina Henke: But Salma basically makes the argument that you can essentially chart shifting environmental concerns by looking at the most popular kids movies of each generation. So in the 90s, it was FernGully.
Salma Monani: That was the time when people were really starting to pay attention to rainforest deforestation, right?
Marina Henke: But for today's students.
Salma Monani: For them, it's more films like Moana. Um, films like Nemo.
Nate Hegyi: Marina, I'm so old, I haven't even seen Moana.
Marina Henke: What about Finding Nemo?
Nate Hegyi: I've seen Finding Nemo. I've seen Finding Nemo. I’m not that old.
Marina Henke: You listen. He knows who Dory is! Yeah, I mean, so for me, Finding Nemo really did leave an impact. Like, I cannot remember a time I was alive that I did not know about coral reefs dying. Yeah, which feels crazy to me. And for the kids of today, they might not see Elsa on educational materials sponsored by some Arctic representative, but frozen two. I don't know if you've seen this. Nate has nature spirits. A visit to glaciers. I would not be the first person to argue. It's kind of a climate story.
Salma Monani: One of the things I like to say is that because film is media, like so much of the media, it gets us to think, and it's that thinking that could spark action.
(mux in, bomull)
Salma Monani: And so how we think about the world around us, including things that are nature or our relationship to what we consider natural. Um has a lot to do with how we've been exposed to it. And and popular film does that.
Marina Henke: I've decided on the show, we're going to call this from here on out, the FernGully effect.
Nate Hegyi: I appreciate that, Marina not calling it the Finding Nemo effect. Thank you.Thank you.
[swell mux here]
VOICEMAIL: New message.
LISTENER: Hey, this is Beth, and I just heard about you, um, doing an environmental movie night, and I think when you should really check out is Princess Mononoke. It's a Studio Ghibli movie from Japan, so enjoy that.
VOICEMAIL: New message.
LISTENER: My name is David Hess. I'm responding to a favorite movies centered around nature in a big way, and I have two. Uh, one is Spring Forward revolves around one year of two guys working for city parks, and it's basically poetry in motion. And two Into the Great Solitude. It's about a solo canoeist who goes on a dream adventure way up in Canada. Thank you.
VOICEMAIL: End of recording.
Marina Henke: Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but I promise, the cinematic romp, it continues right after this.
AD BREAK
Marina Henke: We're back. I'm Marina Henke.
Nate Hegyi: And I'm Nate Hegyi. And you're listening to outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide.
Marina Henke: And today we're talking about how movies shape our views of nature. For this next part of the show, I want to look at how movies have represented just one particular environmental topic, and that is climate change. Are you ready?
Nate Hegyi: Yep.
Marina Henke: Okay. So when it comes to climate change, I'm going to argue that we get two very different types of movies. The first is that educational documentary movie extraordinaire Nate Hegy. What is the quintessential climate change documentary?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it's an inconvenient truth.
Marina Henke: You got it.
CLIP: This is Patagonia. 75 years ago. And the same glacier today. This is Mount Kilimanjaro. 30 years ago and last year.
Marina Henke: So An Inconvenient Truth. It comes out in 2006. It's made by former Vice President Al Gore. The message of the doc is very simple. It is: climate change is real, it is human caused and we can do something to stop it.
Nate Hegyi: I mean, think about it though. It's 2006, you know, like we were still calling it global warming. It was fresh 20 years ago.
Marina Henke: Fresh and apparently good at filling movie seats in 2006. I think it can be easy to forget just how popular this movie was. But there is one common criticism.
Erin Trahan: There's not just like this trick camera work, or you're not exploring the depths of the ocean, or, you know, mountaintop vistas that you see only in intense nature films or documentaries or whatever.
(mux in, Crisper)
Erin Trahan: It's really just him with charts and like on a stage.
Marina Henke: So this is Erin Trahan. She's a film critic and a journalist in Boston. And although a total fan of Al Gore, she described An Inconvenient Truth to me as, quote, a glorified PowerPoint presentation.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And like Al Gore isn't exactly the most compelling speaker in the world.
CLIP: And some of the outgoing infrared radiation is trapped by this layer of atmosphere and held inside the atmosphere. And that's a good thing.
Nate Hegyi: But listen, don't email me about this take. But like, I would fall asleep to Al Gore's voice.
Marina Henke: Yeah. And Erin's point to me also was, you know, she teaches a class about climate change on film, and she assigns this at the beginning of her class. And her point is we need to understand this as part of the canon, right? Even if we think, okay, glorified PowerPoint presentation, it was the first in many ways to hit this massive success. In 2025, now, I mean, we have gone so far beyond An Inconvenient Truth in the last year alone. I mean, you can find a documentary about how climate change is linked to wildfires, a separate doc about climate change being linked to hurricanes. They are, though, all trying to dead on, change our view of the environment. They are going in with a mission, right? The second branch of climate change movie, these are the ones that take climate change and they use it as a plot device. They sort of like Trojan horse it in. You cannot talk about this type of movie without talking about The Day After Tomorrow.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah. Have you seen that movie?
Marina Henke: I have now.
CLIP: Hedlund had some pretty convincing data.They've asked me to feed it into my paleoclimate model to track the next set of events.
Marina Henke: This is a classic, you know, nobody listens to the scientist kind of movie. We've got a paleoclimatologist who warns the U.N. that the planet Earth is about to rapidly enter into another ice age. Nobody listens.
CLIP: Hold on. Jack, are you suggesting these weather anomalies are going to continue. Not just continue to get WORSE.
Nate Hegyi: I really like that movie as a I'm on a plane and I'm bored, and I want to watch a disaster movie. Huge tidal wave wipes out New York City, all of Scotland and the UK just freeze over immediately. It's so unrealistic. But just from like a watching a movie, eating popcorn. It's so fun.
Marina Henke: I mean, we had a listener wrote in and said that this was like one of their comfort movies, you know, for this exact reason. They can sit down and they watch something where this will be full of just, whoa, a tidal wave through New York City.
Nate Hegyi: Then wolves get loose and, like, run around on a ship. That's a weird whole. Yeah.
Marina Henke: Very unexpected.
Nate Hegyi: Weird side quest.
Marina Henke: Yeah. And so you're saying it's a good movie because it's a fun disaster movie. The Day After Tomorrow is not Erin's favorite movie.
Erin Trahan: It's always the end of the world, and it's always one guy who has to save it. And that whole thing is not my thing.
Marina Henke: Erin is, like, not convinced that seeing this type of climate solution again and again is sending the right message.
Erin Trahan: I feel very strongly that this is like a problem that needs collectives. That's really the only way we're going to be able to protect this beautiful natural resource called Earth.
Nate Hegyi: Wait, okay. How does day After Tomorrow end? Don't they all just migrate south to Mexico?
Marina Henke: Yep. They do.
Nate Hegyi: It's not like one man saves the world, it's one man tries to warn everybody and nobody does anything. And then he just tries to save his son and they go to Mexico.
Marina Henke: But even that, it's like one guy had the answer. Like, if only everyone had listened to the paleoclimatologist, like, we would have been fine.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah…
Marina Henke: And her point is like, well, one person is not going to suddenly raise their hand and be like, I understand how to save planet Earth from climate change.
Nate Hegyi: Counterpoint though it is really hard to depict a systemic community response in a Hollywood disaster movie. And I would argue that, okay, it might not be showing that, but the movie is showing the dangers of politicians not listening to scientists, which is also kind of important.
Marina Henke: Yeah. Looking at these two types of movies, I have somewhat of a philosophical question for you right here, Nate, which is which movie do you think is going to inspire more action about climate change? Do you think it's the fact filled documentary An Inconvenient Truth or the glitzy disaster Movie.
Nate Hegyi: I take third option. I honestly take the Finding Nemo route. I think that we've seen that when heartstrings are pulled, that's when people feel like, oh, we need to do something. I mean, like, we protected wild horses and burros in this country because of black beauty and, you know, the image of a horse not as something to eat or just to ride, but as a living, breathing creature.
Marina Henke: So in your case, climate change that's being used in a disaster film. It's really just like maybe helping make a good movie.
Nate Hegyi: No, I think like a disaster movie is great fun to watch. But are we all leaving Independence Day worried about aliens? Not necessarily.
(mux in, Crisper)
Marina Henke: Okay, so as we wrap up, I have a confession to make to you. Yeah. And that is before I started working on this episode, I had entered only what I could describe as a movie watching drought in my life.
Nate Hegyi: Mhm. I mean, that's not bad. You know, like…
Marina Henke: I don't know! I mean, so in preparation for today, you know, needed to do my job. So I watched a bunch of movies. I revisited old ones. I watched new ones, um, horrified by some harrowing tales of nature. I'm now scared of sharks storms the season of winter. Uh, it is not a masterful takeaway that I found from all this, but I was just reminded just how much movies do transport you.
Nate Hegyi: Absolutely. What was your favorite one of all the ones that you saw?
Marina Henke: Oh, man. Um, I rewatched Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah I remember that one.
Marina Henke: Yeah, which shows flooding that happens in Louisiana. It's it's kind of part supernatural at the end. Um, but, you know, I haven't been down to Louisiana ever, And it was just how often do I spend an hour and a half staring at images of a landscape that I don't know?
Nate Hegyi: Oh man, I just love that movies can take you to new places.
Marina Henke: It made me think back to this one moment in my interview with David Whitley. That's the professor who studied animation. I'd asked him this question of like, how can you tell if a movie is really going to impact a child's conception of nature?
David Whitley: There's a sort of question as to within that whole image ecosystem, what is it that gets through and sort of depth to then we carry with us as a sort of touchstone for something that we, we hold on to later on.
(mux in, Brad PKL)
David Whitley: And to be honest, I mean, I don't know the answer to that, but you sort of feel that the things that you love are things which are more deeply invested in your, in your memory.
Marina Henke: I guess, you know, I think David or Salma or Alyssa… like they can't actually tell you that is the movie that is going to make you really connect with nature. But I think that we all know it when it happens, right? When we see that movie that just makes its way in.
David Whitley: And they they have a capacity to come back and, um, and make connections for and with you, um, at later stages in your adult life.
Nate Hegyi: Now, if there is a movie about nature that's stuck with you in some way, let us know. Send a voice memo to Outside In at npr.org.
Marina Henke: Or call our hotline 1-844-GO-OTTER.
VOICEMAIL: New message.
LISTENER: My name is Emma, and the nature movie that I love is The Day After Tomorrow. I watch it numerous times a year. I like how quickly things go wrong and go crazy in that movie. I just love it so much and I love you guys and I'm looking forward to this episode. Thanks.
VOICEMAIL: End of recording.
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: This story was reported, produced and mixed by Marina Hankey. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. I am your host, Nate Heggie. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is NPR's director of on demand audio.
Marina Henke: By the way. We are going to make a movie list to accompany this episode. You can find a link to that in the show notes or on our website, outside-in. Radio Dot music is from blue Dot sessions. El Flaco Collective and Bob Muehl.
Nate Hegyi: Outside In is a production of NPR.
CLIP: Hello, I'm a nocturnal placental flying mammal, a member of the family of pterodidae or pterodidn’t, and they used to call me Batty, Batty Koda.