Finally, for many of us, it’s the holiday season. Time to lounge back on the couch, bundle up in your fuzziest blanket, and pour a cup of creamy hot chocolate. You might spend the holidays with your friends laughing over a board game, or having a hearty meal at the table with your family.

As conversations at the table roar on, the topic may switch to a political one … or an environmental one. Eyes roll, the room fills with groans, and suddenly you’re wondering when dessert will come out. So you offer something neutral, “Why don’t we put on a movie?” Because sometimes, movies can reach places arguments never will, especially environmental ones.  

Environmental storytelling isn’t all doom and gloom, and doesn’t even need to mention climate change. They’re stories where nature comes alive.That is what makes narratives so powerful; they don’t just tell people what to believe. They let people experience it. 

Nature Has a Mind of Its Own in Moana

Moana, the 2016 animated Disney film, follows a girl with a deep connection to nature, particularly the ocean. Her community on the small island of Motunui relies on nearby resources like fish and fruit, and life there is idyllic: resources are plentiful, the ocean stretches clear for miles, and sunsets glow pink every evening. That peace is shattered when the coast no longer teems with fish and the coconuts begin to rot. The island’s prosperity depends on Te Fiti, the life-creating goddess who formed the ocean’s islands. When her heart is stolen, that life-giving force collapses, and the islands she created begin to suffer.

The ocean chooses Moana to save her people and is personified as a playful, almost mischievous character with a mind of its own. Its ripples and waves take on limb-like qualities, grabbing objects or even giving high-fives. The ocean guides Moana to Maui, the thief who stole Te Fiti’s heart and helps her find Te Fiti herself but not before saving her seemingly every time she encounters danger. 

When Moana falls overboard, the ocean places her back on the boat. At one point, Moana and Maui are confronted by a crew of coconut pirates, and the ocean saves them by pushing their boat away. In Moana’s final battle against Te Kā, the ocean opens a safe pathway to where she can safely restore the heart of Te Fiti.  This anthropomorphization of the ocean creates empathy for the environment itself and makes the harm it faces feel personal, even without directly saying “climate change.”

Moana reminds us that nature nurtures us when we nurture it. The ocean takes care of Moana throughout her journey, and she returns that favor by restoring the heart. Moana cleverly highlights the importance of balance between us and the natural world without preaching to us. 

Lessons of Coexistence with Flow

In Flow, another animated film, the characters speak in sounds we are not fluent in. Barks, trills, grunts, squeaks, and sighs fill in where dialogue would typically be. Released in 2024, Flow took home the Academy Award for Best Animated Film. The film follows a curious black cat living alone in a forest near human-made ruins, and it’s clear that humans are no longer around. Soon, rushing water floods the area, and the cat struggles to find high ground. At the last moment, a rickety boat floats along, and the cat jumps in.

The cat makes alliances with an unlikely group of lonely animals: a capybara very focused on finding the best place to sleep, a lemur obsessed with collecting human artifacts, a golden retriever always trying to start a game, and a secretary bird, once exiled from his own flock and now the protector of the group. The world of Flow is lush and vibrant, where the absence of humans gives nature dominance. Very reminiscent of when animals and insects became more visible during the COVID-19 lockdown. 

The environment manifests as its own character, behaving with its own intentional decisions rather than just an aesthetic background. The rising water isolates characters, brings them back together, and chooses where they go in this new flooded world. As a film that lacks dialogue, the viewer is dependent on following the ebbs and flows of the landscape to understand the movie’s direction. 

Chinatown: Lessons From the Landscape 

Under the blistering sun and still air of 1930s Southern California, a tale of corruption and resource manipulation unfolds. Chinatown, the iconic 1974 film starring Jack Nicholson, as detective Jake Gittes, is set in the dusty landscape of California’s Water Wars. During this time, the natural environment of Los Angeles is being manipulated for urban expansion, and the expanding city desperately needs water. The city proposes a route to bring water to the city, but at the cost of surrounding farmers and their livelihoods. 

You may turn Chinatown on to scratch that neo-noir detective itch, but instead walk away with a new understanding of how resources shape power. It reveals how nature can be manipulated as a political weapon. At one point, Jake Gittes hears from farmers who voice their concerns for their dry fields and withering crops. They insist that water is being secretly diverted away from their land at night, leaving them with nothing, while the city still receives its supply. 

Jake discovers that huge plots of bone-dry land are being bought up by mysterious investors. The land is useless, nothing but dust. Why would anyone want it? It turns out that the investors are buying the land for the value it will have once the city’s water supply is redirected back. 

Water is no longer just a resource for survival; it has become a commodity. Conflicts over water rights are not a modern issue; they are part of an ongoing struggle over who controls the fate of the natural world.

Narrative Storytelling Can Change Our Minds

By utilizing powerful stories, movie makers drop cognitive guards, allowing climate-skeptics to gain a deeper understanding of our codependence with the environment. 

Moana shows that the boundary between the natural world and humanity is much thinner than we’d expect. By caring about the animals in Flow, we might make subtle changes in what we value in the real world and how we respect other species. Chinatown exposes our dependence on natural resources and how that can be manipulated for power. These aren’t “climate movies,” but rather wonderful stories that remind us why the environment matters in the first place, and how every aspect of our daily lives depends on its success in some way.

If you enjoyed this article on environmental films, consider reading about how sci-fi films may predict our environmental future or how environmental films offer lessons to our climate crisis. Consider adonation to EARTHDAY.ORG to support further research and awareness, andsign up for our weekly newsletter.

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In an era defined by climate change, deforestation, and ecological crisis, some of the most profound reflections on our relationship with our planet come from film. Through emotional storytelling and compelling imagery, movies have the power to shape public consciousness, especially around environmental issues. Here’s some that stand out and few that may surprise you.

Bambi: An Early Wake-Up Call

Disney’s Bambi may appear at first glance to be a simple coming-of-age story about a young fawn , but beneath its gentle animation lies one of cinema’s earliest and most emotionally grabbing environmental messages. The film throws the main character, Bambi, into a harsh world where woodland creatures must fight to survive. ‘Man’.

The infamous scene in which  Bambi’s mother is killed by a hunter still resonates decades later, not just because of  its emotional impact, but for what it represents. The presence of people almost haunts the forest, even though we never actually see any human beings in the movie, we know that they bring only fire, death, destruction and fear. Long before environmentalism was a widespread movement, Bambi released in 1942  asked us to reflect on our attitude to wildlife and the exploitation of nature  and indirectly challenged us to do better.  

The Wild Robot: Can Technology Live in Harmony with Nature?

In The Wild Robot, viewers are introduced to Roz, a robot marooned on a remote island after a shipping accident. At first, Roz is clunky and alien to the animal inhabitants of the island. But over time, she learns to adapt, communicate, and eventually even raise an orphaned gosling. Roz becomes a part of an  ecosystem she was never meant to enter.

Right away, this film does an amazing job at making us understand the beauty of nature. The artstyle and the animation are gorgeous. The special moments when you see Roz connect with nature, like when he reaches his hands out to touch the butterflies, is simple yet beautiful. The look and style of the film, almost demands that we care about the natural world and all of its creatures instantly

What makes this movie especially compelling though, is its thoughtful meditation on technology and the environment. Most films pit technology against nature, but here we see an instance of technology adapting to work with nature. Even to be humbled and changed by it, as Roz is. 

The message is poignant: while machines may be built to serve humans, they too can evolve. And when guided by empathy and understanding, they can even possibly become allies in the fight to protect the environment. With society hardwired to strive for advancements and the constant battle to develop more, this film addresses what people can use that development for. It is a truly thought provoking film that stays with you long after the movie has stopped playing. 

The Day After Tomorrow: When Nature Strikes Back

In contrast to the fables and animated dramas above, The Day After Tomorrow delivers its environmental message through the spectacle of disaster. The film imagines a not-so-distant future where climate change has accelerated abruptly, triggering a series of catastrophic natural events with superstorms, floods, and a new Ice Age.

While grounded in some real climate science, the film takes dramatic liberties, using rapid glaciation as a metaphor for nature’s breaking point. Cities are swallowed by tidal waves, weather patterns become erratic, and millions are forced to flee. At its core, this film is a tale about the consequences of continuing to pollute and exploit the Earth.

What makes the film especially relevant is how it reframes climate change not as a slow, distant threat, but as an immediate crisis. Given the way in which extreme weather events appear to be happening more frequently around the world in reality, this device in the movie is extra terrifying. It portrays nature as a system with limits that, once crossed, will retaliate with force.  While the film is heavy on disaster-movie tropes, its underlying message is clear: if humanity refuses to change its behavior, nature will change the world for us, just not in the way that we envision.

Princess Mononoke: Balance Between Progress and Beauty

No list of environmental films is complete without one of Hayao Miyazki’s. Perhaps most famously  the Oscar winning The Boy and the Heron, but no Miyazki film highlights the nature of environmental conflict better than Princess Monoke. 

The film follows Ashitaka, a royal prince who is looking to break a curse placed on him, who finds himself in the middle of a war between humans and forest spirits.

What makes Princess Mononoke so compelling is its refusal to simplify. There are no clear heroes or villains. Even Lady Eboshi, the leader of Iron Town, shows her compassion for her people despite exploiting the land around her.  Miyazaki presents both the wonders of nature and the needs of civilization with nuance. It culminates with the theme of balancing progress with nature. What makes the journey so compelling is that while Ashitaka helps to achieve this balance, he can’t do it alone. It involves every character doing their part to help out.

By the film’s end, the forest suffers, but it does not disappear. Likewise, human progress continues, but at a cost. Princess Mononoke leaves us with an uneasy truth: we can’t undo our impact on the environment, but we can choose to live more responsibly. 

Despite this bleak turn of events, the film still remains optimistic. While everyone has suffered it’s not too late to turn back and rebuild. 

A Shared Vision: Warning and Wonder

Despite their differences in genre, format, and tone, Bambi, The Wild Robot, Princess Mononoke, and The Day After Tomorrow all converge around a shared understanding of our place in the natural world. 

Each film shows us that humans are not separate from nature but deeply embedded within it. Our actions ripple through ecosystems, sometimes in subtle ways, and sometimes have huge consequences. Nature, on the other hand, is portrayed as both beautiful and vulnerable. It is capable of resilience, but constantly threatened by the excesses of human industrialization and carelessness.

Ultimately, the lesson threaded through all four films is that ignoring the well being of our environment and wildlife, has consequences. Some are as quiet as a fallen tree, others are as thunderous as a collapsing climate. But even in the face of loss, these stories offer hope. They urge us to rethink our role on this planet, not as masters of it, but as stewards. 

This month support the well being of the planet and consider getting involved in EARTH ACTION DAY or even donating to The Canopy Project. 

This article is available for republishing on your website, newsletter, magazine, newspaper, or blog. The accompanying imagery is also cleared for use. Please ensure that the author’s name and their affiliation with EARTHDAY.ORG are credited. Kindly inform us if you republish so we can acknowledge, tag, or repost your content. You may notify us via email at davies@earthday.org or fielder@earthday.org. Want more articles? Follow us on substack.

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