Home > How They See Us > Archives > 2008 > March > 25 > Entry
See Kermit, it is easy being green after all ….
To most parents, Disney films are family friendly tales that both adults and children can enjoy together.
But an academic at Cambridge University in England claims in today’s London Times that Disney films are a lot more than that. He says they have inspired the environmental movement so powerful today while also encouraging people to think green.
David Whitley, a lecturer in English at Cambridge’s faculty of education, says that Bambi, Baloo, the bear from “The Jungle Book,” and the clownfish in “Finding Nemo” are the “unsung heroes of the green lobby.”
He says that Disney’s films have helped generations of children develop “a critical awareness of contested environmental issues” ever since “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released in 1937.
Conservation is so central to “Bambi,” for example, that it is credited with inspiring many 1960s environmental activists at an early age.
Pro-hunting groups were so fearful of the “Bambi factor” that they protested about the film even before it had been released, he said.
But Tony Juniper of the environmental group Friends of the Earth said: “Undoubtedly there has been a contribution (by Disney). But then again this is a corporation that is building into our culture all sorts of consumer ideas - plastic products and all of that, so the picture is really very mixed.”
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