Look Up, Cli-Fi’s Rising
Don’t Look Up, Princess Monoke, Afire, and The Last of Us—climate fiction, cli-fi for short. Can they inspire more than just awareness?
Cli-fi, coined in 2007 by freelance news reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom, deals with climate change as its primary focus. The genre has grown in popularity since the 2010s and has more recently broken into mainstream media. The 2021 film, Don’t Look Up features a star-studded cast, from Meryl Streep to Jennifer Lawrence. Within a single week, it set a new record for the highest viewing hours before continuing to become the second-most-watched movie on Netflix within 28 days of release.
“I am an optimist myself. I hope cli-fi can help readers and movie-goers break through to the side of optimism and hope”
Don’t Look Up is a clear example of cli-fi’s emergence as a genre to watch. But is it causing fear or action? One Leeds University student states that, “After watching the film, I’ll admit I had to turn on Barbie, something safe and comforting from my childhood you know”.
However, this freeze response wasn’t the consensus. Other students reported that they, “looked for ways to stop climate change” and discovered grassroot organisations in Leeds such as Buy Nowt LS6.
A few mentioned that The Last of Us encouraged them to learn more about the climate crisis, especially after seeing the detailed sets of uninhabited cities reclaimed by nature.
Amassing 8.2 million viewers across all platforms by the season’s finale, TLOU is a 2023 post-apocalyptic TV series based on the video game by the same name. Creative director, Neil Druckmann, discusses his desire to subvert the survival games landscapes which are typically “bleak and serious”. Instead, the plot is told through “environmental storytelling,” and is “really about the interesting contrasts that exist within this world.”
…these climate issues are not something children encounter as they grow older; they are born into our world and into its changing environment.
What is so interesting about cli-fi is the genre’s audience range. From children’s fiction to adult’s, artists acknowledge that the future of humanity and the fate of the planet are intertwined. Unrestricted to just thrilling blockbusters, the likes of Princess Monoke offer cli-fi to younger audiences.
During an interview with Pixar’s creative officer John Lasseter, creator of Princess Monoke Hayao Miyazaki spoke about his presentation of climate change in his work as something that is “just a part of our natural surroundings and its sort of my common sense to depict it. For example, I tell my artists and the team that we are working with to make it look smogier, then it looks more like the actual surroundings that we live in…So, it’s the kind of landscape that our children and we are used to living in.”.
Miyazaki wisely acknowledges that these climate issues are not something children encounter as they grow older; they are born into our world and into its changing environment.
But some are concerned about the genre’s impact. A 2018 study in the journal Environmental Humanities found that cli-fi readers were more concerned about the climate crisis than non-readers. A discovery that may appear positive, but shrouds the reality that cli-fi was associated with “intensely negative emotions”.
Founder of the term, Dan Bloom states, “I am an optimist myself. I hope cli-fi can help readers and movie-goers break through to the side of optimism and hope”. While cli-fi can evoke bleak emotions, the genre’s goal is not to encourage a static response. Some Leeds students stressed the importance of local action as well: “You can’t stop the meteor yourself, but you can recycle”.
As cli-fi continues to grow with the release of Christain Petzold’s Afire and Ben Okri’s Tiger Work: Poems, Stories, and Essays About Climate Change, we must use the genre’s emergence as a way to raise awareness of the climate crisis and spur audiences to take climate action.
