Monsters or Victims? An Ecocritical Reading of Samson and Sally and Dot and the Whale, Retellings of Moby Dick
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2024.50Keywords:
Zoocriticism, Eco-animation, cetaceans, marine world, EcocinemaAbstract
The paper aims to explore two animations, Samson and Sally (1984) and Dot and the Whale (1986), through the lens of zoocriticism (Huggan and Tiffin) and ecocinematic analysis to show how the directors have presented the alternative version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in order to showcase the crises of cetaceans like whale in the present scenario of the global warming, pollution and various anthropogenic damages. Unlike many popular Hollywood movies, these two animated films do not portray whales as monsters. In many popular Hollywood ventures, we can see the representations of vengeful bloodthirsty sea creatures like sharks and whales causing shipwrecks and killing humans, just like Moby Dick did in Melville. However, Samson and Sally and Dot and the Whale propose a different version of Moby Dick, where Moby Dick is portrayed as a saviour of the whale race under the threats of whaling, oil spills, and rising temperature. Samson and Sally is a bildungsroman as it depicts the journey of a young whale in search of the mythical Moby Dick who can only save his clan from whalers who have killed his mother and other relatives. Dot and the Whale, on the other hand, points such issues like the beaching of whales and their exploitation for oil and other resources. These two animations have presented an accurate picture where animals are not presented as monsters but rather victims of human greed. Although these animations are in the anthropomorphised version, they are created to raise human awareness to protect cetaceans and marine life.
References
Alaimo, S. (2014). Feminist science studies and ecocriticism: Aesthetics and entanglement in the deep sea. In G. Garrard (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of ecocriticism (pp. 188-204). Oxford University Press.
Armstrong, P. (2004). Moby-Dick and compassion. Society & Animals, 12(1), 19-37.
Armstrong, P. (2005). What animals mean, in Moby-Dick, for example. Textual Practice, 19(1), 93-111. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236042000329663
Armstrong, P. (2008). What animals mean in the fiction of modernity. Routledge, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203004562/animals-mean-fiction-modernity-philip-armstrong
Baird, A. (1999). White as the waves: A novel of Moby Dick. Tuckamore Books.
Barcz, A. (2017). Animal narratives and culture: Vulnerable realism. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Beale, T. (1839). The natural history of the sperm whale: To which is added a sketch of a south- sea whaling voyage, in which the author was personally engaged. J. Van Voorst. doi: https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryof00beal
Bennett, F.D. (1940). Narrative of a whaling voyage around the globe from the year 1833 to 1836. Richard Bentley.
Bliss, G. E. (2017). Redefining the anthropomorphic animal in animation (Doctoral dissertation, Loughborough University).
Buell, L. (1995). The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture. Harvard University Press.
Caraway, K., & Caraway, B. R. (2020). Representing ecological crises in children’s media: An analysis of The Lorax and Wall-E. Environmental Communication, 14(5), 686- 697. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1710226
Cornell University Blog, Over exploitation of whale population. https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/12/02/over-exploitation-of-the-whale-population/
Copeland, M. W. (1994). [Review of the book Animal victims in modern fiction: From sanctity to sacrifice, by M Scholtmeijer]. Anthrozoös: A multidisciplinary journal of the interactions between people and other animals, 7 (4), 277-280.doi: 10.2752/089279394788609065
Copeland, M. W. (1998). Nonhuman Animals: A Review Essay. Society & Animals, 6(1), 87-100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156853098X00078
DeLoughrey, E. (2019). Toward a critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 57(1), 21-36.
Derrida, J., & Wills, D. (2002). The animal that therefore I am (more to follow). Critical inquiry, 28(2), 369-418.
Diamond, I., & Orenstein, G. F. (1990). Reweaving the world: The emergence of ecofeminism. Sierra Club Books.
Gross, Y. (1986). Dot and the whale. Hotys Distribution.
Hastrup, J. (1984). Samson & sally: The song of the whales. Ebbe Preisler
Heise, U. K. (2014). Plasmatic nature: Environmentalism and animated film. Public Culture, 26(2), 301-318.
Hoare, P. (2008) ‘Troubled waters: Did we really save the whale?’ The Independent. www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/troubled-waters-did-we-really-save-the-whale-935193.html.
Horta, O. (2010). What is speciesism? Journal of agricultural and environmental ethics, 23(3), 243-266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9205-2
Huggan, G., & Tiffin, H. (2015). Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment. Routledge.
Huggan, G. (2018). Colonialism, culture, whales: The cetacean quartet. Bloomsbury Publishing.
King, G. (2013). The true-life horror that inspired ‘Moby-Dick’: The whaler Essex was indeed sunk by a whale—and that’s only the beginning. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-true-life-horror-that-inspired-moby-dick-17576/
Love, G. A. (2003). Practical ecocriticism: Literature, biology, and the environment. University of Virginia Press.
Melville, H. (1851). Moby dick or the whale. Richard Bentley.
Monani, S. (2016). In god’s land: Cinematic affect, animation, and the perceptual dilemmas of slow violence. In R. Alex & S. Deborah (Eds.), Ecodocumentaries (pp. 11-31). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56224-1_2
Paparcone, A. (2020). Between cities and mountains: A look at contemporary ecofeminist cinema in Italy. The Italianist, 40(2), 214-228. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2020.1769306
Plumwood, V. (2002). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge.
Ris, M. (1993). Conflicting cultural values: Whale tourism in Northern Norway. Arctic, 46(2), 156–163. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40511507
Schultz, E. (2000). Melville's environmental vision in Moby-Dick. Interdisciplinary studies inliterature and environment, 7 (1), 97-113. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44087367
Shiva, V., & Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Singer, P. (1975). Animal liberation. Avon Books.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Afterword, pp. 197-205. Routledge.
Steinwand, J. (2011). What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novelsby Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, 182-199.
Stephens, B. (2014). Animating animality through Dumas, d’Artagnan, and Dogtanian. Dix-Neuf, 18(2), 193-210.doi: https://doi.org/10.1179/1478731814Z.00000000053
Stewart, J., & Clark, T. (2011). Lessons from south park: A comic corrective to environmental puritanism. Environmental Communication, 5(3), 320–336.
The International Whaling Commission, https://iwc.int/about-whales/whale-species/sperm-whale
Wells, P. (2008). The animated bestiary: Animals, cartoons, and culture. Rutgers University Press.
Wells, P. (2009). Stop writing or write like a rat’: Becoming animal in animated literary. Adaptation in contemporary culture: Textual infidelities, [kindle version].
Von Mossner, A. W. (2020). Larger than Life: Endangered Species across Media in Louis Psihoyos’s Racing Extinction. Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 24(2), 19- 35.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Journal of Narrative and Language Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.