The animated features featured in Fables for a Fragile Earth have their individual protagonists—the fearless teenage princess of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and the titular trash-compacting robot of WALL-E, to take two examples—but what unifies the works in this series is their shared sense of ecosystem-as-character, of the natural world as a living organism, and an organism that we can bring either further suffering, or much-needed relief and renewal, through our choices and actions. Films for all ages that make no effort to sugarcoat the real threat of devastating environmental catastrophe we face in the present, while also helping us to imagine better possible futures.
