Eco-Tainment #9: Tokyo Mew Mew

My very first Eco-Tainment review was for Hiyao Miyazaki's anime film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I'm not going to repeat what I said about it here, but suffice to say it was one of the precious  few works of environmental fiction that conveyed its message in an even-handed, sophisticated manner. Unfortunately, most of Miyazaki's fellow Japanese animators have not been nearly as nuanced in their environmental messages as he is.
 Tokyo Mew Mew, which aired from 2000 to 2003 in Japan and from 2004 to 2010 in the United States  (under the alternate title MewMew Power),  is a case in point.The program revolves around five teenage girls who each receive the power to transform into a respective animal--an Iriomote wildcat, a blue lorikeet, a golden lion tamarin, a finless porpoise, and a Humboldt penguin-- and become the guardians of the Earth and its ecosystems. This setup is reminiscent both of other series in the Japanese "magical girl" genre, such as Sailor Moon, and of American environmental cartoons like Captain Planet and FernGully. 
The antagonists, on the other hand, are alien invaders who seek to accelerate and use humanity's pollution of the Earth for their own ends. While this admittedly avoids many of the unfortunate implications of having a villain who pollutes simply out of greed or malice, it still falls short of the layers of subtlety that real-life environmental narratives possess. Tokyo Mew Mew is probably better than Captain Planet or FernGully, but it is nowhere near the standard set by truly skilled storytellers.
If there is one thing that can be learned from this, it is that perhaps the superhero genre is inherently unsuitable for giving viewers environmental messages. After all, a hero needs a villain to fight, and the often abstract concepts of environmentalism seldom make for good or marketable villains.

                                                     
                   On a show like Tokyo Mew Mew, a subtle, realistic depiction of environmental issues takes a backseat to a dramatic conflict between good and evil. While this is fine from an narrative perspective, what does it say about how we actually perceive environmentalism?