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

Abstract

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.