The Sublime and the Cute in Bong Joon Ho’s Ecocinema

Abstract

From the television series Planet Earth to documentary jeremiads like An Inconvenient Truth, viewers are inundated with sublime images of nature that overwhelm them with feelings of awe. Images of cuddly, cute animals, on the other hand, populate newsfeeds but play only a minor role in the visual rhetoric of environmental activism. This article analyzes two films from Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, Snowpiercer and Okja, to trace the implications of these two views of nature and argue that invoking the sublime seamlessly functions with colonialist notions of a universal global environmentalism. The minor pleasures of cuteness, by contrast, open spaces for localized resistance to the harm of environmental colonialism.