November 23, 2008: Wall·E
The folks from Pixar have dominated children’s animation for over a decade now, creating iconic stories and characters accessible to children and adults alike, not to mention generating unfathomable volumes of tie-in merchandise. From the first feature Toy Story in 1995, through a couple of (to my thinking) near-missteps along the way with A Bug’s Life and Monsters Inc, to more recent entries such as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, moviegoers and critics the world over are amazed every time at how Pixar manages to bring some facet of the inanimate or fictional world to life. A number of short films througout this time have also permitted the realization of smaller stories, and helped to move the animation technology forward.
Wall·E takes us to earth’s future, where robots large and small have been tasked with cleaning up the mountains of garbage generated by humans, who have long since left the earth for space station resorts with all the creature comforts of home. Wall·E himself is a small garbage-cleaning robot and the only one evidently still functional after all these years, collecting bits and pieces of human memorabilia as he goes along. When a distinctly feminine probe robot (Eve) comes to earth to check and see whether the planet can sustain plant life again, a robot romance begins and as they zip around the galaxy, we learn that corruption remains a part of human nature even after all the harsh lessons of the harm it causes.
There is minimal dialogue in the film, with much of it being repetitive robotic words resembling english. The anthropomorphized robots are expressive enough, however, that this is not a problem at all.
The trick Disney has managed to pull off here is to base an entire story around the fact that human overconsumption and smothering of nature has driven people to disengaged and unrecognizable lives, while at the same time Disney remains the poster child for corporations encouraging costly overconsumption and disengaged electronic existences staring at screens. To stand so boldly in the face of this irony is ballsy, to say the least. Good points are made, even if humans aren’t likely to take them to heart.
A nice little touch at the end of the film comes when the Pixar lamp (which forms the “I” in the company name in the intro) has its bulb changed to a compact fluorescent. Gotta keep with the times!
Post a Comment