“Our World is ending, but Life Must Go On.”..: Post-Apocalyptic Dystopias in Contemporary Children’s Films | Adam Brown

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Adam Brown In its dystopian vision of the future, the Disney/Pixar film Wall-E (2008) portrays human beings as having rendered themselves anonymous and redundant by mass consumerism and automated machines, transforming Earth into a desolate wasteland in the process. Another recent children’s animated science- fiction film, Shane Acker’s 9 (2009), takes this bleak scenario a step further, positing the extinction of all human beings and focusing on the struggles of tiny robots trying to survive in the aftermath of apocalyptic warfare. This paper will examine the growing intersection of environmentalist discourses and dystopian paradigms in children’s cinema, considering the rich intertextual fabric of the genre, which also includes the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar (2009). I will argue that while mainstream films such as these reveal considerable potential for ideological subversion – certainly much more than is commonly recognised – these representations nonetheless entail significant limitations, and one must question the potential for such texts to effectively implicate viewers in the social and environmental problems they purport to critique. Adam Brown teaches history, literature and communication studies at Deakin University and works in the testimonies department at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne. He completed his PhD on Holocaust representation, particularly focusing on how complex human behaviour is explored in cinematic representations of the event.