ABSTRACT
Chapter 9, “Disney and Pixar’s Cars Franchise: Comic Environmental Nostalgia vs. Simulacra,” analyzes Disney and Pixar’s Cars (2006), Cars 2 (2011), and Cars 3 (2017) through the lens of environmental nostalgia. In all three animated films, technology becomes both culture and nature, taking representation to a level where machines replace all forms of “natural” living beings, so much so that tractors fill in for cows. For us, however, both positive and negative visions of environmental nostalgia complicate the figurative death of nature such simulacra signify.
