Artists for the Earth
Saving the World, One Movie Night at a Time
December 18, 2025
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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