Chapter 9 Animating the waters, hydrating history: control and contingency in Latin American animations

Abuela Grillo: privatisation and the Water War in Cochabamba

Abuela Grillo is an animated short film produced by the Animation Workshop, with the participation of Nicobis Escorzo, from the Comunidad de Animadores Bolivianos and with the support of the Embassy of Denmark. The animation was directed by French filmmaker Denis Chapon, with the participation of the important Bolivian animation director Alfredo Ovando and Luzmila Carpio, an internationally recognised Quechua singer and songwriter.¹⁵ The narrative consists of two intertwined stories, one mythological and the other based on recent events. The former is the myth of the Ayoreo Indigenous people living in Bolivia and Paraguay about Abuela Direjná (or Abuela Grillo), the mistress of water. According to stories told by these Indigenous people and described in a children’s work by the Bolivian writer Liliana de la Quintana, one day, Abuela Grillo produced catastrophic rainfall, forcing the Ayoreo to expel her from the community. After Abuela Grillo’s departure, a great drought hit the region, causing the grandchildren of the inhabitants who expelled Direjná to set out on a journey to bring her back.¹⁶ The second story is about the popular uprising in Cochabamba in 2000 against the privatisation of water led by a conglomerate of multinational companies.

Thus, Abuela Grillo focuses on Direjná’s errant trajectory. At first, she settles in a village, producing welcome rains for local subsistence agriculture. The problem is that these rains become torrential and even catastrophic, so the community decides to expel her. Later, business agents find Abuela Grillo in the city, imprisoning her. They start to charge for the water she produces while singing, while the poorest populations and those in the interior begin to suffer both from the lack of rain and the abusive prices for water, now privatised. During the peak of conflicts between Indigenous populations and security forces defending corporate interests, Abuela Grillo produces a great cataclysm that ends the war.

In part, this animation dialogues with a movement of reaction to the expansion and intensification of the capitalist/extractivist model in South America. In peasant and Indigenous communities in the Andes, this reaction has as a striking feature the environmentalisation of struggles in the ontology of buen vivir.¹⁷ Buen vivir (sumak kawsay and sumaq qamaña) is a complex set of knowledge and practices based on the remnants of the historic livelihoods of Andean Indigenous peoples. It has been recognised as an alternative to European notions of progress, development and consumption-based well-being.¹⁸ It is a broad and diverse concept that develops in particular ways through the practices of different Indigenous populations, Andean social movements and state policies, as in Bolivia and Ecuador. Common to all these versions is the criticism of the notion of development, anthropocentrism and patriarchy, proposing multicultural forms of existence, consensual participation in the political sphere and a non-hierarchical relationship with nonhumans, who can be understood as subjects of rights just like humans.¹⁹ The biocentric and even animist dimension – related to the notion of Pachamama – is identified as fundamental in the formulations of buen vivir. Abuela Grillo is somehow part of this movement of ontological contestation of Cartesian realism that is the basis of the capitalist economic model and of the modern State, suggesting alternatives for the relationship between humans and nonhumans.

On the other hand, the animation addresses the historical episode of the reaction to the privatisation of water in Cochabamba led by international organisations and which became known as the Water War. Cochabamba has been the scene of conflicts related to water, both because of its semi-arid condition and the great inequality in urban supply, producing a chronic problem of scarcity.²⁰ In the 1990s, the World Bank recommended and supported a broad structural reform in Bolivia, which included water distribution services, which should be privatised and water taxed according to market criteria. At the end of 1999, without popular consultation and in breach of due legal process, the municipal water distribution company was granted to the multinational company Águas Del Tunari. In addition to the concession having provoked tension with several Indigenous communities, peasants and irrigators who controlled water management in their territories, in January 2000, the company implemented a 35 per cent increase in tariffs, which provoked the rebellion. As a result of massive protests with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets, violent repressions and negotiations, the concession was cancelled in April of the same year. This was an important victory for social movements against a neoliberal and globalising logic of water management.²¹

Despite the animation portraying the episode of the Water War in Cochabamba, there is no explicit sign of praise or exaltation to the event. It appears more as a backdrop to water itself, embodied in Abuela Grillo and her powers. This is perhaps due to the controversial circumstances following the rebellion. Water scarcity continued in Cochabamba, as well as uneven distribution in the urban area, especially as city dwellers remained on the sidelines of the protests.²² Despite the solidarity at the time of the rebellion, the maintenance of peasant and Indigenous autonomy turned into a dispute over water. Finally, the idea of democratising decision-making processes, very much in vogue in the movement’s slogans, resulted in limits and tensions involving the state and local groups that controlled irrigation infrastructure and were also at the forefront of the protests.²³ Given this scenario, most of the participants in the Cochabamba rebellion supported the mega-project for water transposition and the construction of the Misicuni hydroelectric power plant, which caused several impacts on the environment and the livelihoods of the Indigenous and peasant communities of the Misicuni valley.²⁴

On the other hand, as much as Abuela Grillo is somehow inserted in the movement that values Andean Indigenous ontologies as ways of contesting the philosophical bases of capitalism, she also keeps an implicit distance in relation to the ideas and activities framed as buen vivir. Some studies describe buen vivir (or vivir bien) as a concept encompassing culturalist, contradictory, hybrid and idealised discourses constructed by extracting practices and knowledge in specific Indigenous and peasant contexts.²⁵ According to some authors, these notions are often unknown to most Indigenous and Andean populations. However, they are generalised in formulating public policies to raise funds for international organisations that support environmental conservation while disguising alternative and conventional capitalist development projects.²⁶ Far from focusing on transcendental dimensions or on the Ayoreo myth itself, the animation uses the idea of buen vivir as a support for a narrative anchored much more in the immanence of water – which is visible in Abuela Grillo’s behaviour – thus avoiding these controversies.

The animation Abuela Grillo starts from some implicit anxieties about the various contradictions, conflicts and debates around water. The rejection of green capitalism – which calls for increased management and efficiency in water use through technical, scientific and economic control – is explicitly portrayed as negative and even perverse, expressed in the most varied ways that capitalist agents violate Abuela Grillo. On the other hand, the peasants who expelled Abuela Grillo go to the city to rescue her from her capitalist prison, even though she does not return to the peasant community after the end of the conflict, as in the Ayoreo myth. The hypothesis to be developed later in this text is that, far from siding with either contesting force, this animation uses them to reject the modern idea of water as a resource, contradicting the perspective of a fragile or passive element awaiting preservation or conservation.

Nimbus, o Caçador de Nuvens: water and developmentalism in Brazil

While in Abuela Grillo water is amid social conflicts over different forms of economy, ways of life and material needs, in Nimbus, the Cloud Hunter the dilemmas are much more implicit and existential. This is a Brazilian short animation released in 2016 by Marco Nick in partnership with Factorio Studio and Leben 108 Filmes, participating in several national and international festivals. The story is centred in a small village in the midst of a dense forest, whose population has clothes and customs that resemble traditional peoples. The protagonist of their traditions is Nimbus, a boy who spends his days hunting and trapping clouds and stars. The stars are used as bait to capture the clouds, which are placed in a machine that forces them to precipitate water and emit electricity, both used to generate the drinking water that supplies the village. However, a mysterious spirit of the forest appears in the village and causes a small event that distracts Nimbus during the functioning of the rain-generating machine. This minor distraction is enough for the clouds to break free, causing a massive storm that devastates the village. After the catastrophe, Nimbus continues his journey to imprison more clouds and restart its work.

Although he is a dreamy and innocent boy, Nimbus manages the water distribution in the village, which justifies the imprisonment of clouds and stars to generate well-being for the community. But this practice proves to be perverse, constituting a sort of torture of nature (in this case, clouds and stars) along the lines of what was widely defended in the works of Scientific Revolution philosophers in the seventeenth century. According to Carolyn Merchant, philosophers such as Francis Bacon used torture and rape as metaphors for the scientific method. Just as the inquisitors imprisoned, interrogated and tortured witches to obtain their secrets and confessions, scientists should imprison, interrogate and torture nature to unveil its secrets with a view to the progress of humanity.²⁷ The indirect reference to the imprisonment and torture of nature using characters that embody water is not exactly new in animations, as seen in the case of the character Lapis Lazuli in the first season of Steven Universe, which ran between 2013 and 2015.

The animation was produced in the final moments of the new developmentalist model implemented by leftist governments in Latin America, especially in Brazil, between 2003 and 2016 (the Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff administrations). This model was initially highly praised for having as its motto the reduction of social inequality with income redistribution policies, wage increases and GDP growth. However, in reality, what was seen was macroeconomic stability sustained by the explosion of exports of primary goods (commodities) with the intensification of the exploration of land, minerals, forests and water, construction of large hydroelectric projects and increased consumption, with limited results in terms of reducing social inequality.²⁸ Also, this development was linked to a green capitalist model, which tried to combine accelerated economic growth with the transformation of biodiversity, forests, and water into environmental services under the tutelage of the global financial market.²⁹ The relative success of this model and its emphasis on strengthening the national bourgeoisie was also fundamental for Brazil’s sub-imperialist expansion in Latin America via the financing of the construction of infrastructure megaprojects such as the Cachuela Esperanza hydroelectric plant in Bolivia.³⁰

With all its contradictions, the political, geopolitical, economic and environmental circumstances in South America, especially in Bolivia and Brazil, are the background that unites Abuela Grillo and Nimbus, in the seven years that separate the release of the two animations. However, in Nimbus, there is a clear tendency to exempt the protagonist from any malevolent intention regarding the clouds and stars. Nimbus is portrayed as a boy who, innocently, does not understand that there may be other ways to generate water in the village other than using technocratic measures. In Abuela Grillo, contradictions exist both in the way peasants deal with water and in the perverse treatment given to Direjná by businessmen for profit. On the other hand, in Nimbus, there is a softer connotation of the intentions behind the attempt to dominate the waters. This stems from the emphasis that the animation gives to the moral lesson and the proposition of an alternative ethics in the relationship with water and other nonhumans. This ethic has a much more cooperative than antagonistic connotation, which perhaps has impacted the structure of the narrative.

However, even though there is an emphasis on moral teaching and ethical principles at the end of Nimbus, both animations are linked much more to the immanence of phenomena than to ideas. The encounters, events and affections are fundamental in Nimbus’s repentance and in forming an ethical alternative that mysteriously expands in the village. As in Abuela Grillo, the notion of water as a resource is rejected through an alternative and immanent perspective of water. On the other hand, in his relationships with the rest of the world, water somehow forces the protagonist to produce new meanings and representations in the face of what manifests itself as wonderful, surprising and even terrifying. These concrete aspects, which will be analysed later, are fundamental to the story’s ending.

Indifference, dissolution and contingency

As a character, Abuela Grillo is not openly portrayed as water but as an anthropomorphised cricket. This has to do with the very core of the Ayoreo myth, where the mistress of the water is shaped like a cricket. Despite this appearance, Abuela Grillo is considered to be water, regardless of what can be seen directly on the character’s surface. In the case of Abuela Grillo, water works as something very close to a last-instance identity in a Laruellian sense: it is a real essence apparently ‘removed’, but which is neither a backdrop nor an attribute, but a transunary manifestation of the world.³¹ ‘Transunary’ means that, as a trope, the real manifests itself as a limit, traumatising the production of meanings and languages, and determining thought while remaining indifferent to concepts, theories and representations.³² Thus, water determines Abuela Grillo’s behaviour, regardless of her thoughts, conscious desires and body appearance, similar to what happens to Elsa of Arendelle in the animation Frozen.³³ But unlike Elsa, who experiences the drama of being water herself throughout Frozen and its sequel, Abuela Grillo does not resist this indifferent determination imposed by reality.

Perhaps because Abuela Grillo does not show any resistance to this determination, the indifference of the waters is manifested in the character’s behaviour throughout the nearly thirteen minutes of animation. Arriving in a subsistence farming village, Abuela Grillo makes it rain and stays there after a child invites her to stay. After she decides to stay, she delivers an ear of corn to the child’s father, symbolising the possibility of abundant harvests. But this is just a possibility. By making it rain day and night and producing a catastrophe, Abuela Grillo provokes in that man the desire to throw the corn she had given him in her face, making her stop singing and leave. Abuela Grillo’s irritation is momentary. She leaves in the same calm way she had arrived, thus continuing her journey through cities, fields and high mountains, producing rain, snow and winds with varying intensities, being well received and treating everyone politely. For the population that expelled it, what was left was a devastating drought, killing rivers, animals and agriculture. Abuela Grillo doesn’t need anyone, but all living beings need her and her singing.

While they understand that human society depends on water, businessmen do not understand that substance’s uncontrollability. They believe they can control, conceptualise and value matter, something that is at the heart of capitalism, as argued by Katerina Kolozova.³⁴ In the city, Abuela Grillo is imprisoned and forced to sing so that she produces ever-growing amounts of water. Then the businessmen that imprisoned her start to produce and manage an artificial scarcity, limiting the quantity of water to be consumed by each inhabitant. The man that threw corn on Abuela Grillo’s face is the one who finds her imprisoned and tortured, instigating the rural population to rise in rebellion in the city. Even though tortured, humiliated and imprisoned, Abuela Grillo reacts violently only when she sees her face on the surface of a bar-coded plastic bottle. The devastating storm she creates destroys the entire city and frees her. However, after this, she continues her journey. She does not care much about the rural folk that tried to free her; there is no sign of gratitude. On the contrary, those same people start to follow her, singing with her. Thus, the most evident situation in Abuela Grillo is how much the water affects different human social groups in different ways due to an unavoidable physical dependence. On the other hand, water’s most fundamental attributes prove little affected by human actions, as Abuela Grillo’s imprisonment and torture do not change her behaviour and power over the planet.

In Nimbus, indifference is much less evident. In reality, the universe seems more collaborative and stable, being disturbed by human attempts at technological domination. Thus, animals, humans, clouds, liquid water and stars are all inserted and participate in the constitution of the same world, which is disturbed by an erroneous notion of a relationship with the Other. Unlike what happens in Abuela Grillo, the main character is a human, and the anthropomorphic clouds (clusters of water and ice particles with eyes and mouths) are secondary characters, though of paramount importance to the story. These clouds are tortured and oppressed by a machine that makes them produce precipitation to supply the village with water. Not only do humans benefit from the water plucked from the clouds, but the demand for domestic animals and livestock, treated empathetically by humans in the village, is also met. This fictional society has a clear hierarchical differentiation between organic and inorganic, even if wild animals rarely appear in the story. Thus, Nimbus is less centred on the nature of water and more on how water constitutes a universe that is one and plural at the same time. Here, indifference makes sense when one observes how water manifests itself in certain moments of the plot.

Even though it is less centred on the identity of water, it manifests itself in Nimbus as strikingly as it does in Abuela Grillo. This identity is linked to dissolution in a broad sense. There are several studies that emphasise the dissolutive manifestation of water, and how much this has been approached in different forms of art today.³⁵ In these works, dissolution is generally described as catastrophic: creative death, or the formation of new scenarios, things and lives through the dissipation of what existed previously. This is usually more evident in hydrometeorological phenomena, although it also occurs at the molecular level. In Nimbus, upon destroying and freeing themselves from the machine responsible for their torture, the imprisoned clouds unite and form a great storm, destroying the village, dreams, work and the boy’s reputation. The water supply in the village also becomes subject to the risk of shortages, with the destruction of the technical apparatus responsible for its management. Despite the main character’s apparent determination to return to the village to resolve the situation, he proves unable to do anything in the face of the event’s grandeur. Everything he had conquered dissolved, and a new beginning was needed.

In Abuela Grillo, the dissolutive aspect manifests at the story’s beginning and end. Fearing the consequences of the heavy rains brought by Abuela Grillo, the peasant populations expelled her. Later, this dissolutive condition manifests more dramatically, mixing with the urban struggles for water and eventually destroying the latter and the privatisation ambitions. Although it suggests destruction resulting from the battle between people, the sequence is ambivalent because water is abundantly present on all sides, indicating previous flooding at a catastrophic level. As a dissolution agent, the water cannot be understood within the parameters of modern law – that is, as a public and private good (which is at the heart of the debate about the Water War in Cochabamba) – but as a phenomenon and event that escape the production of meanings and means of control, whether collective or individual. And it is through this immanence that the story provokes the audience to think about the idea of water as a good, whether public or not.

Indifference (markedly intense in Abuela Grillo and less evident in Nimbus) and dissolution (as something that belongs to an identity of waters) lead to a contingency principle in both animations. In the first scene of the animation, the appearance of Abuela Grillo in the small farming community bringing a welcome rain in the sowing period was not expected. Likewise, no one imagined that her staying would bring the spectre of famine upon the occurrence of torrential rains. The expulsion of Abuela Grillo generated a much more dramatic and unexpected effect: the drought, which turned the possibility of famine into a concrete event. Imprisoning her in the city would have other effects, such as privatising water and producing a shortage leading to mass protests and clashes in the city. Though at this point in the plot, everyone acted as if Abuela Grillo were a fragile, manipulable entity, liable to be imprisoned or whose liberation required humans, she surprises again by creating a great storm that induces the resolution of the social struggle.

A parenthesis is in order about the apparent fragility and sadness of Abuela Grillo in prison, which contaminates the perception and attitude of practically all the characters in the story. If indifference and dissolutive power characterise Abuela Grillo, why does she submit to torture and jail in the city? This ambivalence is associated with the power and the resigned and sad attitude of water elemental characters, which is related to the element’s identity. Gaston Bachelard observes this fundamental ambivalence through contradictions and a fluidity typical of water, which operates simultaneously with fragility and strength, femininity and masculinity, death and life, calm and devastation.³⁶ Water is contradictory and extreme, which applies to Abuela Grillo’s behaviour. This behaviour is very similar to that of Lapis Lazuli, who was also imprisoned and tortured in the animation Steven Universe. Despite being the most powerful character in this animated series, Lapis Lazuli is the one who suffers the most throughout the story and also the one who demonstrates the most ambivalence in her behaviour. She varies between a melancholy passivity and the manifestation of immense powers that victimise and subjugate both those who consider themselves capable of oppressing her and those who consider themselves capable of protecting her. Like water, both Abuela Grillo and Lapis Lazuli ‘withdraw’ from total intelligibility by manifesting self-contradictory and non-linear behaviours consistent with a water identity. This condition intensifies the contingent character of the agency of water in the world.

In Nimbus, the ambivalent character of water is also evident in the performance of clouds. Faced with the collapsing machine, the clouds break through the cages’ bars that imprison them. Why didn’t they do it before? This is an unanswered question but one that the non-linear and self-contradictory identity of the waters can explain. On the other hand, although the clouds formed a great storm and devastated the small village, Nimbus’s change at the end of the story engenders a peaceful and collaborative attitude on his part towards human affairs, as they relinquish their posture of control and dominion over water. This surprising ending is very different from what happens in Abuela Grillo. Still, it also highlights the contingent character that always leaves the viewer and the characters themselves in doubt about the possibilities, future events and consequences of relationships with water. The very turn in Nimbus’s thinking and attitudes is the result of a contingency: guided by a kind of forest spirit to the top of a mountain where an intense storm was raging, Nimbus does not find death and destruction, but the collaborative creation of a sublime universe that delights him.

Thus, in both animations, contingency is very close to the definition proposed by the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, which is a pure possibility without causality or reason for being. It is not related to the inevitable precariousness and destructibility of things at some point in the future but only to a possibility that may or may not materialise.³⁷ Dissolution is an important part of water’s identity, but this power may or may not manifest itself in historical processes. In both Abuela Grillo and Nimbus, water is not manageable and controllable. Still, at some point, it was under apparent human control and dominion (justifying its significance as a ‘resource’) without any reason for this submission. Likewise, the disruptions that dissolved scenarios, plans, meanings and intentions also occurred without apparent causality. The exception is the big storm produced by Abuela Grillo in the city, hinting at a rebellion against its commodification. In Nimbus, there is no reason for the storm that devastates the village, although the machine’s collapse that trapped the clouds can be understood as a facilitator of the process. Thus, three aspects that summarise water in both animations are indifference, dissolution and contingency.

In historical terms, these alternative ways of thinking about water can inspire the analysis of its agency, which affects all aspects of human life. Both animations analysed here show frustrated attempts to control and dominate water for human consumption, to maintain an economic system or ways of life marked by dichotomies that produce an idealised and hierarchical world. Even under apparent human control, water acts through its indifference to desires and meanings, dissolving and traumatising various aspects of human social life in a contingent way. Thus, success or failure in managing water or manipulating it as a resource has a logic that can be compared to the randomness of a dice roll. The dice-rolling metaphor is used by Louis Althusser when analysing the randomness of the effects of encounters: nothing can guarantee their success or failure, their consequences, or even their effectiveness.³⁸ Both animations suggest that the historian should understand human interventions on the water as encounters, going beyond the representations of human actors who understand – and often describe in the sources they produce – they are dominating and controlling natural elements. In this way, one must primarily observe the unexpected and undesirable effects of/in these processes, understanding the successes not as triumphs of human reason but as possibilities that could (not have) come true.

Final remarks

Abuela Grillo and Nimbus, o Caçador de Nuvens are animations of the environmental genre anchored in different historical, political and social circumstances, reflecting anxieties about the water problem in Latin America. On the one hand, Abuela Grillo reflects the debates on buen vivir in the Andean countries and, on the other hand, the reactions and movements to contest the neoliberal water regime implemented in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than an exaltation of these movements, the animation indirectly draws attention to the controversies surrounding these processes, highlighting the contradictions in the behaviour of different social groups in the face of the erratic flow of water embodied in the character Abuela Grillo. These controversies are related to the moment after the historical events portrayed in the animation, when leftist governments appropriated specific ideas of traditional populations, continuing management practices and capitalist development in new ways. Nimbus is immersed in this developmentalist context. Despite speeches and propaganda about social well-being and the reduction of inequality, developmentalism retained the logic of management by intensifying water exploitation.

In addition to being important sources of a historical analysis of conflicts related to water in Latin America, these animations can inspire the historian to go beyond the classic notion of water as a resource, representation or scenario of human actions. Rejecting the idea of water as a resource to be managed or protected/conserved by humans, both animations suggest an identity of water linked to the notions of indifference, dissolution and contingency, which are central to analysing its active dimension in the constitution of the past. Thus, these animations tease the viewer about something that environmental historians usually ignore: that water movement is a real phenomenon that often escapes human narratives, meanings and control. A story that prioritises human narratives, ideas and intentions as its engines – retaining the notion of water as a resource or representation of human agents – is nothing more than a social story that unduly appropriates the ‘environmental’ label. Here ‘environmental’ is more an adjective than an alternative possibility of thinking, being and living on the planet and with the other entities that form it. In this sense, more than serving as historical sources, environmental animations can be powerful instruments of social, theoretical and methodological change for history and other humanities disciplines.

Notes

1. 1. Philip Kelly Denslow, ‘What is animation and who needs to know? An essay on definitions’. In: Jayne Pilling (ed.) A reader in animation studies. London, Jon Libbey, 1997, 1–4.

2. 2. Jelisaveta Blagojević, ‘Thinking WithOut’. In: Katerina Kolozova & Eileen A. Joy (eds.) After the speculative turn: realism, philosophy, and feminism. Santa Barbara, CA, Punctum Books, 2016, 95–106.

3. 3. Lincoln Geraghty, ‘Introduction: future visions’. In: Lincoln Geraghty (ed.) Channelling the future: essays on science fiction and fantasy television. Lanham, MD, Toronto and Plymouth, UK, The Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009, vii–xviii; David Whitley, The idea of nature in Disney animation. Hampshire, Ashgate, 2008; Peter Hunt, ‘Introduction: fantasy and alternative worlds’. In: Peter Hunt & Millicent Lenz (eds.) Alternative worlds in fantasy fiction. London, Continuum, 2001; Paul Wells, Understanding animation. London and New York, Routledge, 1998.

4. 4. David C. Wright, Jr., ‘Constructing a grand historical narrative: struggles through time on highlander: the series’. In: David C. Wright, Jr. & Allan W. Austin (eds.) Space and time: essays on visions of history in science fiction and fantasy television. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company, 2010, 116–30; Judith Lancioni, ‘The future as past perfect: appropriation of history in the Star Trek series’. In: Space and Time, 2010, 131–55.

5. 5. Haraway, Donna, Simians, cyborgs and woman: the reinvention of nature. New York, Routledge, 1991; Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2016.

6. 6. Adam O’Brien, Film and the natural environment: elements and atmosphere. London-New York, Wallflower Press, 2018.

7. 7. Eli Dunn, ‘Steven Universe, fusion magic, and the queer cartoon carnivalesque’, Gender Forum. An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 56 (2016), 44–57.

8. 8. André Vasques Vital, ‘Lapis Lazuli: politics and aqueous contingency in the animation Steven Universe’, Series – International Journal of TV Serial Narratives 4, no. 1 (2018), 51–62; Vasques Vital, ‘Water, gender, and modern science in the Steven Universe animation’, Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 8 (2019), 1144–58.

9. 9. Evelyn Ramiel, ‘Growing up in the Crystallocene: how Steven Universe teaches compassion for broken worlds’. In: John R. Ziegler & Leah Richards (eds.) Representation in Steven Universe. London, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 171–96.

10. 10. Nicole Starosielski, ‘ “Movements that are drawn”: a history of environmental animation from The Lorax to FernGully to Avatar’, The International Communication Gazette 73, nos. 1–2 (2011), 145–63.

11. 11. Dustan Oeven & Moisés Cabral, Entrevista com o morcego [Animated Short Film]. Etnia Produções e Cinematografia, 2000.

12. 12. Diogo Viegas, O diário da Terra | Earth Diary [Animated Short Film]. Viegas Estúdio, 2011.

13. 13. Jamie Linton, What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver, UBS Press, 2010.

14. 14. Pat Cooper & Ken Dancyger, Writing the short film. Third Edition, Amsterdam, Elsevier Focal Press, 2005, 1–5.

15. 15. Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animation: a world history. Volume 3: contemporary times. Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press, 2017, 323.

16. 16. Liliana de la Quintana, Abuela Grillo, ComKids, August 14, 2013, https://comkids.com.br/abuela-grilo.

17. 17. Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson, ‘An expanse of water: how to know water through film’. In: Lisa Blackmore & Liliana Gómez (eds.) Liquid ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean art. New York and London, Routledge, 2020, 54–70.

18. 18. Nicolás Cuvi, ‘Indigenous imprint and remnants in the tropical Andes’. In: John Soluri, Claudia Leal & José Augusto Pádua (eds.) A living past: environmental histories of modern Latin America. New York, Berghahn, 2018, 67–90.

19. 19. Eduardo Gudynas & Alberto Acosta, ‘La renovación de la crítica al desarrollo y el buen vivir como alternativa’, Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana 16, no. 53 (2011), 71–83.

20. 20. Nicola Neso, ‘De la guerra del agua hasta la guerra del gas – los movimientos sociales de Bolivia y la elección de Evo Morales’, Iberóforum. Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Iberomaericana 8, no. 15 (2013), 207–32.

21. 21. Carlos Crespo Flores, ‘La “Guerra del Agua” en Cochabamba: movimientos sociales y crisis de dispositivos del poder’, Ecología Política 20 (2000), 59–70.

22. 22. Thomas Perreault, ‘From the “Guerra Del Agua” to the “Guerra Del Gas”: resource governance, neoliberalism and popular protest in Bolivia’, Antipode 38, no. 1 (2006), 150–72.

23. 23. Nina Laurie, Robert Andolina & Sarah Radcliffe, ‘The excluded “indigenous”? The implications of multi-ethnic policies for water reform in Bolivia’. In: Rachel Sieder (ed.) Multiculturalism in Latin America: indigenous rights, diversity and democracy. New York, Palgrave, 2002, 252–76; Maisa Soledad Bascuas & Irene Provenzano, ‘El agua en Bolivia después de la crisis neoliberal: entre la apertura democratizadora y los límites del andamiaje estatal’, La Revista del CCC 19, no. 7 (2013), https://www.centrocultural.coop/revista.

24. 24. Paul Hoogendam & Rutgerd Boelens, ‘Dams and damages: conflicting epistemological frameworks and interests concerning “compensation” for the Misicuni Project’s socio-environmental impacts in Cochabamba, Bolívia’, Water 11, no. 3 (2019).

25. 25. Víctor Bretón Solo de Záldivar, ‘Etnicidad, desarrollo y “buen vivir”: reflexiones críticas en perspectiva histórica’, Revista europea de estudios latinoamericanos y del Caribe – European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 95 (2013), 71–95; Andreu Viola Recasens, ‘Discursos “pachamamistas” versus políticas desarrollistas: el debate sobre el sumak kawsay en los Andes’, Íconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 48 (2014), 55–72; Pablo Alonso González & Alfredo Macías Vázquez, ‘An ontological turn in the debate on buen vivir – sumak kawsay in Ecuardor: ideology, knowledge, and the common’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 10 (2015), 315–34.

26. 26. Alison Spedding Pallet, ‘ “Suma qamaña” ¿Kamsañ muni? (¿Qué quiere decir “vivir bien”?)’, Fe y Pueblo 17 (2010), 4–39; Sandro Mezzadra, ‘América Latina: entre impasse y nuevo conflicto social. Notas para reabrir la discusión’. In: Mauro Cerbino & Isabella Giunta (eds.) Biocapitalismo, procesos de gobierno y movimientos sociales. Quito, FLACSO, 2012, 97–108; Denise Arnold, María Clara Zeballos & Juan Fabbri, El “vivir bien” (suma qamaña / sumaq kawsay) en Bolívia: un paraíso ìdealizado no tan “andino”’, Etcétera. Revista del Área de Ciencias Sociales Del CIFyH 4 (2019), 1–29.

27. 27. Carolyn Merchant, The death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. San Francisco, CA, Harper & Row, 1980.

28. 28. Lauro Mattei, ‘Brazilian development at the beginning of the 21st century: economic growth, income distribution, and environmental destruction’. In: Heinrich Böll Foundation (ed.) Inside a champion: an analysis of the Brazilian development model. Berlin, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2012, 31–44.

29. 29. Camila Moreno, ‘Green economy and development(alism) in Brazil: resources, climate and energy politics’. In: Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2012, 45–59; Larissa Packer, ‘From nature to natural capital: how new legal and financial mechanisms create a market for the green economy’. In: Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2012, 114–28.

30. 30. Armando Boito, Jr. & Tatiana Berringer, ‘Brasil: classes sociais, neodesenvolvimentismo e política externa nos governos Lula e Dilma’, Revista de Sociologia e Política 21, no. 47 (2013), 31–8; Rafael Teixeira Lima, ‘Entre o imperialismo e o subimperialismo: a projeção brasileira à Bolívia e ao Peru nos governos Lula da Silva (2003–2010)’, Rebela 6, no. 3 (2016), 530–45.

31. 31. François Laruelle, Theory of identities. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. New York, Columbia University Press, 2016, 45.

32. 32. Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s holocaust of animals: a non-Marxist critique of capital, philosophy and patriarchy. New York, Bloomsbury, 2019, 21–2.

33. 33. André Vasques Vital, ‘Water spells: new materialist theoretical insights from animated fantasy and science fiction’, HALAC-Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña 12, no. 1 (2022), 246–69.

34. 34. Kolozova, 2019.

35. 35. Astrida Neimanis, ‘Feminist subjectivity, watered’, Feminist Review 103 (2013), 23–41; Vasques Vital, 2018; Vasques Vital, 2019; Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, ‘Seawater’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 21, no. 2 (2021), 207–17.

36. 36. Gaston Bachelard, A Água e os sonhos: ensaio sobre a imaginação da matéria, Translated by Antônio de Pádua Danesi. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1997.

37. 37. Quentin Meillassoux, After finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency. London, UK, Bloomsbury Academic, 2008.

38. 38. Louis Althusser, ‘The underground current of the materialism of the encounter’. In: Olivier Corpet & François Matheron (eds.) Philosophy of the encounter: later writings, 1978–1987. London, Verso, 2006, 163–207, p. 174.

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