Ahead of the Oscars, 'Climate Reality Check' Challenges Representation of Climate Change in Hollywood

At a time when climate change is inescapable, only one film nominated for an Oscar this year references the issue and deals with it appropriately, according to a new report that evaluates how climate change is represented on screen. Published by Good Energy, an organization that helps television and film writers include climate change in their storytelling, the report checked the narrative of 30  scripted, feature-length films that received Oscar nominations, crowning the film “The Wild Robot” as the sole picture that passes the test. 

The climate change reality check report is loosely based on the Bechdel test, an evaluation that measures how women are portrayed in the media invented in the 1980s by cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The climate reality check measures whether climate change exists in a given story and whether a character knows it exists. The development of the test was based on interviews with screenwriters and movie executives, says Good Energy founder Anna Jane Joyer. 

“We were trying to think of something similar to the Bechdel test that's creatively generative, that is easy to use, that any writer or audience member or researcher could use,” Joyer says. “We worked on development for about two years with Dr. Matthew Schneider Mason, who was at Colby College then and just moved to Rice University. We interviewed over 200 screenwriters, creative executives, and experts to make it as attractive and as usable as possible to screenwriters and executives, who are our core audience. But also, Matthew is really thinking about it through the lens of a researcher.” 

The test does not seek to prescribe the inclusion of climate change into Hollywood narratives, nor does it push for climate change to be the center of the story. According to the report, the intention is to uplift stories that reflect our current reality and “help us navigate what it means to be human in the age of climate change.” The test was born out of Joyer’s disappointment with how films and TV are currently tackling climate change — or not tackling at all — while she was experiencing climate anxiety. 

“I turn to stories to process difficult emotions, and it really struck me that I wasn't seeing my world or my emotional experience about climate change be reflected in TV and films,” Joyer says. “It's important in the same way that any form of representation is important. There's just something really, really powerful about being able to relate to a character or a story and see yourselves in them.”

The only film that portrays climate change and the characters know about it is Universal Pictures’ “The Wild Robot,” a tale about a robot, Roz, who finds herself on an island without humans. Roz is extremely adaptable, so she learns how to speak to the animals, helping them with the challenges of living in the wild and becoming wild herself. 

“Have you ever imagined whales swimming over the Golden Gate Bridge? That’s the world we enter in 'The Wild Robot,' where climate impacts and situations — from sea-level rise to hints that humans have isolated themselves in climate-safe, domed cities — are subtly woven into the fabric of the storyworld,” the report reads. “The story is propelled by themes of cooperation and bridging divides, with Roz learning to ‘speak animal,’ and the animals learning to accept this strange chrome creature.”

For Joyer, “The Wild Robot” stands out not only because it weaves climate change beautifully into the narrative, but also because it displays some of the skills we should be developing in response to climate disaster.

“It really communicates a lot of the values that we need to be able to survive this, and learn how to be human in the age of climate change by overcoming differences and fears, learning to work together with people, or in this case, animals and robots who are different than you,” Joyer says. “These are the kinds of stories that really help us grapple with this, and find courage and learn how to survive both on an emotional level and actually going through horrible disasters, as we just saw in Los Angeles and my other hometown of Asheville, North Carolina.”

Despite “The Wild Robot” being the only film that passed the climate change reality check, Joyer hopes the test becomes a tool regularly used by storytellers to evaluate their own stories and to make sure Hollywood is representing the reality of climate change on screen. Good Energy plans on tracking whether climate change representation changes over time, positively or negatively. 

A big obstacle to inclusion of climate change in films and TV is how complex the subject is to make into accessible storytelling, Joyer says. “The main way that writers were getting climate information was through traditional news media, or nonprofits that really didn't know how to talk to creators and creatives and storytellers. It was communicated in ways that weren't super creatively inspiring or even accessible to screenwriters and studio execs.” 

As a veteran in the entertainment business, she says things are shifting already. “I remember when we first started that a writer told me there's two things you never pitch in a writer's room: abortion and climate change,” Joyer says. “We've really dramatically seen that change in the five and a half years that we've been working in this industry. There's a lot of demand and appetite [for these stories] both from audiences and from creators and buyers.”