Person in a wet suite blowing air bubbles from beneath the ocean.

Humour for change? Melting ice and environmental fragility in the animated film comedies Ice Age: The Meltdown and Happy Feet Two

Publication date
Monday, 21 Aug 2023
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A person in a yellow coat looking at large floating pieces of ice and broken icebergs.

This article explores how environmental knowledge about global warming and the melting of ice is communicated through humour in the computer-animated films Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) and Happy Feet Two (2011) and the educational role that ecocritical narratives can play. Bringing together approaches drawn from science communication, humour and animation studies, popular entertainment studies and the environmental humanities, we argue that both films communicate environmental fragility and awareness through comedy without ridiculing the seriousness of climate change, with humour serving to highlight the representation of climate change across both fictional and real-life contexts.

Read full article by Parth Thaker, Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Karina Judd, Anastasiya Fiadotava, Anne Hemkendreis, and Christopher Holliday in the Journal of Science & Pop Culture.