(Un)natural Childhood in the Bush: Home and Mobility in Hunt for the Wilderpeople

As part of a renewed interest in the concept of home within film studies (Avery 2014; Wojcik 2024; Sborgi and Patton 2024), this paper explores the ways in which ideas of childhood, nature, and mobility shape contemporary representations of home and homemaking. Recent US filmmaking has seen a reinvestment in pastoral views of nature as a pure space away from the wrongs of consumerist-capitalist society. In particular, films about alternative modes of life in nature—Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016), Leave No Trace (Debra Granik 2018)—invest in children’s perceived affinity with the natural world as a response to the sense of dislocation created by the increasing mobilization of the global world. Against a perceived loss of externality in contemporary times—a sense that, in globalization, there is no longer an “out there” or an “away” to go to (Wood 2005, 172)—these films return to nature as an idyllic, almost mythical space where children can truly develop a sense of home. Such consideration of the wild as the natural space of childhood is underpinned by a coding of both ideas, nature and childhood, as united by a shared sense of stability. If nature is thought of as appropriate for children, it is because it provides them with the fixity, structure, and stability needed for their development—as opposed to the hectic, chaotic rhythms of the global. This way, the affinity child-nature assumes rootedness and fixity in space as preconditions for the existence of a home, thus presenting mobility as antithetical to processes of homemaking. Bringing together film studies (Martin 2019), environmental humanities (Morton 2007; Seymour 2018), and geographical approaches to the home (Mallett 2004; Blunt and Dowling 2006), this paper reads Taika Waititi’s adventure comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) as a subversive alternative to such filmmaking trend. Freely adapting Barry Crump’s classic book Wild Pork and Watercress (1986), an escapist tale of survival in the New Zealand bush, the film traces how 12-year-old Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) and his foster uncle Hector (Sam Neill) journey through the wild in the search of the meaning of home. This paper argues that the comedic modes used by the film (slapstick and parody) work to de-essentialise nature and its affinity with the child, this way freeing the idea of home from the precondition of rootedness and stasis. As it parodies aesthetic strategies associated to ecocinema (i.e. the cinematic pan) and emphasizes the chubby kid’s physical unfittedness for natural forms of life, the film undermines children’s innate ability to establish roots in nature. In turn, mobility—and its potential for enabling social relations and encounters—is positioned as a structuring factor in allowing that the protagonists find home.