The current study is an attempt to fill in a gap in Ecocriticism which until recently has focused on literature defined as Nature Writing; poetry, fiction and drama. Yet, with the move toward ecocritical Film Studies, there is a place for work on animated feature films. The premise of the study is the ethical and environmental implications as exemplified in the two selected enviro-toons: Disney's Bambi (1942) and Dr. Seusss's The Lorax (1972). The depiction of the wilderness and the representation of nonhuman animals provide a rich context to investigate ideology and power to explore oppressive practices of contemporary society. The selected enviro-toons strongly articulate ecological crisis-hunting, species loss, pollution, deforestation and overproduction. Consumption is driven by the industrial capitalism's profit motive and the "jobs-jobs-jobs" rhetoric adopted by the industrialist Once-ler in The Lorax. On the other hand, Bambi, the Prince of the Forest, stands for the environment as an ecological sublime-that is-the Wilderness trope is worthy of awe and wonder. The distinct language of animation is evidently defined by multiple characteristics. Animation is a culturally determined vocabulary, interpreted and applied differently by individual animators, hence, all animation inevitably carry some form of authorial signature or/and "studio style". Herein lies the choice of the two enviro-toons; Disney's 'realist' style fits into orthodox animation while that of Dr. Suess is 'abstract' and 'experimental'. Therefore, the focus is on the poetics of enviro-toons, that is, not only what cartoons show but how they show ecocritical sensibility and how it affects the way of 'seeing' and understanding the human/nonhuman world.

The current study examines the fictional screen figure King Kong-as envisioned by the New Zealand director Peter Jackson in his 2005 remake-to question European ambivalence towards the Self/Other binary division. The modern 2005 Kong acts as a counter visual icon to the Eurocentric version of colonialist ideologies to expose their hypocrisy and myth-making colonial history. The present study is an attempt to integrate the visual narrative of King Kong (2005) into the framework of Postcolonial paradigm and within the theory of Adaptation to highlight the points of departure undertaken by the Postcolonial director Peter Jackson. The study seeks to establish Jackson's revisit of a prior work as a "willful act" to reinterpret the screen figure Kong as a "Subaltern" subject whose quest for a voice is central to the film's message. The dialogic relationship between the old and the new cinematic narratives is investigated to challenge Essentialist Western View of "Othering" so as to provide a Postcolonial revision of a fluid relationship between a prior work and a belated one. Thus, the aim of the present study is to deconstruct stereotypical representations, to historicize and contextualize Kong as a cultural and historical metaphor in Postcolonial Cinema. Animal Studies can offer new interpretations of how nonhuman animals can deconstruct the ontological Western discourses of rationality and capitalism within Postcolonial Cinema to rethink the boundaries that separate human and nonhuman.

The present study seeks to examine the poetics of the visual narrative art in a postmodern picturebook as exemplified in Shaun Tan's The Red Tree (2001). The Red Tree illustrates a fragmented journey through a gloomy world. The text is bare and matches the dim and surreal illustrations. The Red Tree is a postmodern visual narrative in tenor and form appealing to the resourcefulness of the child reader. The subject matter of the visual narrative is the visual narrative itself, i.e. fiction about fiction which celebrates the floating of meanings, the boundary-breaking indeterminacy and the counterpointing relationship between the text and the illustrations. The postmodern picturebook, unlike traditional picturebooks, does not seek to deliver a specific meaning, but rather provides the child reader with an experience of exploring an array of possible meanings. This study seeks to explore the notion of the child reader as a co-author of a postmodern picturebook in an endeavor to interpret the visual narrative's paralinguistic cues. With this rationale, The Red Tree is a picturebook without a specific narrative which follows a red-haired girl as she wonders aimlessly through a series of selfcontained, highly detailed surreal landscapes accompanied by a vague and minimal thread of text, thus, the illustrations are purposefully open to interpretations and are mostly quite surreal in both the stylistic approach and the subject matter which is characteristic of postmodern texts. Therefore, it is my attempt to pursue the metalanguage of children's postmodern picturebook, a genre of literature worthy of serious analysis and investigation. The current study explores the visual syntax of the illustrations to construct a visual discourse through 'reading images' in a postmodern children's picturebook.

The current study aims at theorizing the question of identity within the framework of postcolonial studies in two visual narratives: Belle Yang's Hannah is My Name (2004) and Guene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (2006). Asian American studies have recently interrogated identity marking a shift from ethnic nationalism to recognition of multiplicity. The study also seeks to counter Orientalist stereotypes in American literature through the analysis and examination of postcolonial Asian American Diaspora to highlight a number of questions: 1) How is the identity of the Asian immigrant's hybrid visually constructed? 2) How can Asian American visuals be addressed in non-white children's literature? 3) What nurtures the transnational imaginations of the authors/illustrators in question? 4) What are the ramifications of transnational perspectives on Asian American narratives? 5) What are the nature of belonging and citizenship? The questions are a vehicle to investigate the cultural and ethnic politics of Chinese American literature and to explore new forms of self-identification in American literary discourse. They also yield rich insights into how to practice multiculturalism. What draws the visual narratives in question together is their postcolonial theme of reformulated identity to unsettle dichotomies within Asian American community. Furthermore, the present study explores semiotic systems in terms of image syntax, gestural, spatial and iconic signs to examine the relation between the denotative context of the narrative text and the connotation of the visual text that creates polysemous illustrations and indefinite meaning-making.