For my class on Ecocritical Approaches to Film, I wrote a short blogpost to draw a connection between An Inconvenient Truth and the animated short-film The Man Who Planted Trees. I looked at how both films seek to convey a message of hope by putting the power of environmental change into the hands of the individual.
In An Inconvenient Truth, the moviemakers successfully portray how the individual can make a difference in multiple ways. For one, it uses the ‘conversion narrative.’ The article “The Rhetoric of Ascent in An Inconvenient Truth and Everything’s Cool” states that a conversion narrative refers to a story that centers on “one who was lost but now is found” (Minsler 28). In the film, Al Gore is represented as a regular guy who had an awakening and decided to dedicate himself to combatting pollution and global warming. In this way, Gore becomes a beacon of hope – a rolemodel we can look up to and say, “if he can do it, I can do it.”
Similarly, the ending serves to compel the individual to enact changes that matter to the planet, such as recycling and planting a tree. In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, scholar Stephen Rust explains how this concludes the film “in the space of hope, reframing the “too bigness” of climate change in terms of an individual’s power to enact changes…” (Rust 202). An Inconvenient Truth thus shows us that one individual can serve as inspiration for thousands of people – and that we can, each one of us, decide to become that individual.
In The Man Who Planted Trees, the power of the individual is likewise a prevalent theme.
Like Al Gore, Elzéard Bouffier serves as an inspiration to the viewer. An ordinary man who has experienced immense sorrow, he decides to plant a forest and by doing so, sow the seeds of happiness for generations to come. What is even more remarkable – he does not correct the authorities or the townspeople when they assume the forest is a miracle of nature. Throughout the film, the narrator comments on his admiration of Bouffier. For instance, at 16.29, he remarks, “When I reminded myself that all this was the work of the hand and soul of one man, with no mechanical help, it seemed to me that men could be as effective as God in tasks other than destruction." Later, at 18.42, he states “When I think that one man, one body, and one spirit, was enough to turn a desert into the land of Canaan, I find after all that a man's destiny can be truly wonderful." Through the example of Bouffier, the movie inspires us, the viewers, to rise above ourselves and see that we can each make a positive difference.
In both these films, a role model is thus effectively used to combat human destruction, inspire hope and illustrate that change begins with the individual.