Wall-E

[Dust Bunnies]

Just saw it. It was a great movie. I did sense some underlying messages (below the Romance theme/robot mutiny)

Environment: Earth becomes toxic
Obesity: The people were so overweight/lost bone that it was difficult to walk.
Corporation=bad: Big Corporation becomes government and takes over world basically. Because of this world becomes toxic.

[Sugar Hill Kevis]

I'm sure it's a perfectly enjoyable kids film. I loved (and still do love) pixar flicks.

I saw the right wing blogosphere (please shoot me for using that word) ranting against the film because of its "left wing propaganda" :laugh: So I'm sure it's worth checking out! Pixar tends to have those kind of moral underlyings doesnt it? I remember some middle aged marxist woman I used to work with (in a kids theme park) was talking about Robots having a vaguely leftish parable about it...

[Dicktator]

Just saw it. It was a great movie. I did sense some underlying messages (below the Romance theme/robot mutiny)...

Cool. This is so much better than a many other comments I have read that consist of "it was so emo!" which tell me almost nothing.

But, what were some of the underlying messages? You mentioned things that were pretty up front, it seems. Any evil stuff stashed below the surface?

[Lost In Translation]

I've found that a lot of animated films (and cartoons) involve a evil rich tycoon with a big fat monopoly being the antagonist, and a normal person being the protagonist, so this has become something of a motif. Still, with a robot i guess it's different.

[Dust Bunnies]

Cool. This is so much better than a many other comments I have read that consist of "it was so emo!" which tell me almost nothing.

But, what were some of the underlying messages? You mentioned things that were pretty up front, it seems. Any evil stuff stashed below the surface?

Surprisingly it really wasn't pro-corporation/Capitalism at all. I will be honest, I teared up at one point.

[rocker935]

I think im gonna go see that tonight.

[rocker935]

Just saw it, it was awesome!!!

[professorchaos]

I saw it after hearing all the hype. It was good, especially for the genre. Probably the best Pixar flick except for Toy Story. But it wasn't as good as everyone would have you believe. It's very well done and I just think people respond to the topical relevance.

[Dust Bunnies]

It was the best pixar film. So did anyone else who saw it see any other little messages?

[rocker935]

Just because something makes your life easier doesn't mean it makes your life better. This is expressed by showing how once they are exposed to the world and earth they enjoy it much more. Its a classic capitalist argument, "thanks to capitalism you have the car, don't you think the car makes your life easier. Now you don't have to walk to school." But Wall-E show that the dependence on electronics and shit makes your life miserable and easy.

[rocker935]

It was the best pixar film. So did anyone else who saw it see any other little messages?

Yeh, I agree, definitely the best. It was very intellectually deep.

[RevMARKSman]

It made absolutely no sense. Suddenly, these people are going to re-grow all the crops in the world from one (green bean? clover? weed?) plant.

I found it very shallow and easy to see through. Guess that's what you get when you combine a kids' film with an adult's environmental concern. The "underlying themes" the OP saw were really overlying themes - not much of an attempt at subtlety.

[BogdanV]

I for one was quite curious if I was the only guy sensing left-wing messages in Wall.E. It seems that I'm not a singular case, so I'll express my impressions here:

-A. Humans and "malfunctioning" robots = working class.
-B. Robots under Auto's control = state apparatus.
-C. Plant = instrument of power (liberation/oppression, depending on the keeper)
-D. BnL = Big Brother, the "ruling-class metaphor"
-E. Earth = us, our life, everything that we represent

A. Humans on-board the Axiom are the typical, "middle-class" people, kept in a tight-controlled state of well-being so that they wouldn't bother (or even notice ! ) that their life is, from A-Z controlled by the upper-class.
Clear symbol : Overweight = vulnerability, dependability, lack of freedom.
Also notice the woman's reaction to her surroundings, when Wall.e shuts-down her holoscreen : She seems dazzled, amazed, as if a whole universe was kept secret from her and now, by accident, all was revealed.
They were in a total bliss, completely ignorant of their life !

As for the malfunctioning robots : they represent the working-class that lives in poverty, labouring in sweat-shops, more aware of the true nature of capitalism. They are the exception to the norm, and because they refused to obey their "directives", they are persecuted, labelled as "broken" and send to the "repair ward" (ie. prison/death camp/etc).
In the scene where EVA is undergoing diagnostics, notice in the background a robot under repair, catching fire and "dying".
You could consider that, though not explicitly, as oppression towards "enemies of the state", towards workers who simply refuse to "kiss their master's feet".


B. Robots that aren't "malfunctioning", are nothing more than mere servants of capitalism.
We have "pacified", "neutralised" proletarian, bureaucrats, cops, and at the top of it all, Auto. Axiom's autopilot, supposedly, a servant of the Captain (who, himself is a metaphor of the People).
Auto is the robot that coordinates all actions on the ship. Thanks to him, Axiom's passengers are reduced to no more than pitiful plants. Completely dependant, helpless and ignorant, and Auto makes sure that they stay so, always.
Notice a glimpse of capitalist indoctrination at the kindergarten, "B is for BnL, your best friend !".


C. The plant. The element capable of changing the tide of the battle. Because of the plant, Auto's true nature unfolds, and also because of it, humans discover their true identity and finally realise that Auto (the ruling-class) is not the friend, but the foe.
In this situation, humans must seize the plant (take power from the capitalist oppressors and back into the hands of the people) from Auto, in order to return to Earth (the path towards Communism).


D.Buy n Large. The metaphor under which oppression always hid herself. It is the same ruling-class, from Ancient times to modern-day.
CEOs (despotism, monarchy, fascism, capitalist democracy) have ruled and died, but BnL was always the same (ruling-class/proletariat division always existed).
The idea of "continuity of oppression" is suggested by the now-ancient recordings of the BnL CEO from the time when Earth was under evacuation, suggesting that several hundred years have passed, and BnL was still the same, following the same rules/directives as outlined from the beginning.
Also, a sample of capitalist hypocrizy, the "Operation Recolonize" fraud and the secret, classified A113 directive, which overrides "Operation Recolonize" and unfolds the real face of capitalism, while the "Recolonize"-sharade is carried-on, to fool the masses.


E. And finally, Earth. The place we abandoned in our foolishness, and the place where we return, to fulfill our duty towards ourselfes.
Earth is freedom and prosperity. Earth is Utopia. Earth is the sum of humanity's entire qualities, squashed and hidden away by BnL and fiercely covered by Auto, to channel humanity into sacrificing all of its potential for the good of a small, aggressive and selfish elite that gives nothing in return.
The plant is the Revolution's Spark. The journey back to Earth is the path towards Communism, together with the Revolution (the overthrowing of Auto) and the replanting of Earth is the building of Socialism and eventually, Communism.

This is my interpretation of the animation. I hope some of my ideas, if not too crazy, have helped others in viewing Wall-E in a different light than your average capitalist movie.

[khad]

Louis Proyect on Wall-E. Don't shoot the messenger.

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/wall-e/


The Disney animated feature Wall-E received many Academy Award nominations including one for best original screenplay. It was also named the best animated feature by my colleagues in NYFCO, a group that I obviously have much more respect for. Since the movie supposedly embraces environmentalist values, I finally decided to order it from Netflix despite my misgivings over anything associated with Walt Disney. It turns out my misgivings were well-founded.


Wall-E is the acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, the robot star of the movie who is a blend of R2-D2 and ET, in other words just the kind of cuddly creature that can lend itself to vast ancillary sales in toy stores. (One Wall-E replica sells for $49.95 on amazon.com.)
For the first 20 minutes or so, we follow Wall-E on his daily rounds as he wheels around an uninhabited metropolis that is literally deluged with garbage. His job is to sweep up the garbage, compact it, and stack it in heaps that are now as tall as the buildings. Although we don’t learn why or how it came to pass, the robot possesses a human personality that leads it to salvage bits and pieces of junk that strike its fancy, including a diamond ring in a blue velvet box. He throws out the ring and saves the box, one of the few genuinely comical touches in this grating film.


We eventually learn that the earth has become uninhabitable. All of its inhabitants are now in a space station far from earth where their every need is attended to by robots. So pampered are they that they have lost the ability to walk on their feet. More corpulent than anybody ever seen in a Minnesota shopping mall, they look rather like Jabba the Hutt. One gets the strong sense that director Andrew Stanton doesn’t care much for overweight people. Ironically, he cast Jeff Garlin as the voice of the captain of the space station. Best known for his role as Larry David’s agent on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Garlin has struggled with weight issues all his life. A N.Y. Times magazine profile reveals how serious his problems are:


I eat some food and gain some weight. If it were a logical thing, I’d be having a great time all the time. But it’s not, and I don’t know how to fix it. I know that I don’t want my kids to have eating issues. My mother didn’t understand a proper serving, but I don’t blame her. That’s how she was taught. But you’ve got to say, “I’m not passing that down.”


A robot named Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) eventually joins Wall-E on the ruined planet. She has been sent there from the space station in order to look for vegetation. Like other Disney movies, the two robots fall in love just like Lady and the Tramp, or Bambi and Faline. Since the two robots are rather weak in the character development department, their relationship just doesn’t generate a lot of warmth-at least that was my reaction. It is rather like seeing one vacuum cleaner French kissing another, if you gather my drift.


As it turns out, Wall-E has already discovered a plant before Eve’s arrival. Once she discovers it in his shack, her mission is accomplished and a space ship returns to earth to bring her back to the space station with her discovery. Since poor Wall-E can’t live without her at this point, so to speak, he hitches a ride on the rocket and returns with her for the final two-thirds of the movie, which I found utterly uninspired. It turns into a struggle between our lovable robot couple and the computer controlling the space station, which has decided that a return to earth is futile.


Played by Sigourney Weaver, the computer is an obvious imitation of the one that ran the space ship in 2001. Indeed, one of the more notable aspects of this movie is its almost feverish desire to recycle movie iconography from the past 50 years or so. The plot itself borrows from Waterworld, I, Robot, and Artificial Intelligence: AI. Meanwhile, Wall-E’s comical peregrinations are an obvious homage to Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen’s robot turn in Sleeper. I strongly suspect that a failure of imagination led to this reliance on pastiche.
But my real problem was with the movie’s faux environmentalism. While the planet is suffering from a crisis of corporate pollution and waste products, the movie is so detached from what is happening today that its message would be lost on any analytically minded child, or adult for that matter.
There is also the issue of the movie’s fat phobia. Despite my distaste for Spiked Magazine, a libertarian publication out of Great Britain, I think that they are on to something when it comes to fat phobia:


One of the more depressing things about the constant talk of an obesity epidemic that is killing us all, and most particularly our children, is the media’s constant readiness to give room to almost any nonsense so long as the word fat appears in it, while ignoring significant research that fails to fit the now-conventional wisdom that ‘being fat = death’.
Recently this trend has been on display in the way in which the British press has uncritically reported the views of Professor David Hunter of Durham University. Described by the Daily Telegraph as a ‘leading public health expert’, Hunter has claimed that the UK National Health Service (NHS) will become unaffordable due to the costs of treating obesity-related diseases, opined that obesity requires ’strong action’ from government, and demanded that the government require tobacco-like warnings on foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar. Claiming that the obesity epidemic posed as significant a threat as terrorism, Hunter derided the official response as nothing more than ‘piddling’. According to Hunter, half the British population will be obese by 2032.


Despite the fact that most critics agreed with the N.Y. Times’s A.O. Scott that the movie advances “a critique of corporate consumer culture”, director Andrew Stanton disavows any such intention, stating in one interview (http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-WALL-E-s-Andrew-Stanton-9323.html):


I hate to not be able to fuel where you want to go, but it’s not where I was coming from. I knew I was going into that kind of territory, but I didn’t have a particular message to push. I don’t have a political or ecological message. I don’t mind that it supports that view, it’s a good citizen way to be, but everything I wanted to do was based on the love story.


Just a final word on the Disney corporation, which has the gall to distribute this movie and produce others like Madagascar in the save the planet vein. This is a predatory corporation that seeks to impose its culture on the rest of the world. Before Disney sold WABC radio to Citadel Broadcasting (the financially ravaged company has just be delisted from the NY Stock Exchange), it gave a voice to some of the worst pro-corporate and pro-pollution personalities on the planet, from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity.

[BogdanV]

Well, hell. My post is "written-proof" that each individual can have a completely distinct view on the same subject.
If you want to see nothing, you see nothing; it all depends on the viewer.
Honestly, IMO, I could give less of a crap about the guy's opinion.
Sure, he's entitled to it, but if I enjoyed the movie, I don't care what others have to say about it.
I enjoyed it and that's all that matters to me. Case closed*.

PS: Even if some think of it as a half-assed movie, it sure beats Rambo or Terminator or any other "shoot-whatever-you-see" movie.

*for me. others can ramble about it as they see fit.

[khad]

Well, hell. My post is "written-proof" that each individual can have a completely distinct view on the same subject.
If you want to see nothing, you see nothing; it all depends on the viewer.
Honestly, IMO, I could give less of a crap about the guy's opinion.
Sure, he's entitled to it, but if I enjoyed the movie, I don't care what others have to say about it.
I enjoyed it and that's all that matters to me. Case closed*.

PS: Even if some think of it as a half-assed movie, it sure beats Rambo or Terminator or any other "shoot-whatever-you-see" movie.

*for me. others can ramble about it as they see fit.
Louis Proyect is just a well-known American Trotskyist in the blogosphere. I am not a Trot, but I merely thought that it would be interesting to present his opinion.

[BogdanV]

If you felt offended by my post, please excuse me as it wasn't my intention.
As you said, you just carried a message.

PS: Some of the comments on his blog could also be quote-worthy.

[CommunityBeliever]

The fact that they spent like 200,000,000$ on this film kind of rids me of saying anything good about it. If they actually cared about the environment then you know how many solar panels could have been distributed with that money? A lot.

[Agrippa]

The fact that they spent like 200,000,000$ on this film kind of rids me of saying anything good about it.

All films are, by their inherent nature, products of capitalist production, regardless of their budget. Are we not allowed to enjoy any film?


If they actually cared about the environment then you know how many solar panels could have been distributed with that money? A lot.

Nothing says "we care about the environment" like battery acid and cadmium. :rolleyes:

Maybe if you cared more about the environment, you'd spend the time you normally spend posting on the "film" section of the message board doing something you think will help...

[Bilan]

It was cute. The negativity in it I wouldn't call 'left wing' as such, but certainly reflected a popular idea at this time - the concern for the environment, and the issue of obesity in the West. The corporation idea, too.
But myes. Cute.

[CommunityBeliever]

All films are, by their inherent nature, products of capitalist production, regardless of their budget. Are we not allowed to enjoy any film?

I didn't say you aren't allowed to enjoy a film maybe its funny or exciting but don't act like these capitalists who made it actually care about the environment or the future of the Earth rather then profit.

[Sam_b]

Wall-E is maybe the most annoying character thing i've seen in years. Kill it with fire.

[Bilan]

Wall-E is maybe the most annoying character thing i've seen in years. Kill it with fire.

You're so dreary.

[ckaihatsu]

So did anyone else who saw it see any other little messages?


It implicitly sends the political message that *everything* is better when computer-generated...!


x D

[ckaihatsu]

Thanks, BogdanV, for translating the movie's themes into explicitly societal language -- it saves me from having to write it....

I will only add that the premise of the movie is a scathing critique on the timidity, self-absorption, and escapism of the postwar suburbia experiment. (In reality the suburbs, in their fleeing, came face-to-face with The Void, did an about-face, then craved, and wantonly borrowed from, urban culture -- at the same time the cities have become very suburbified, mainly due to the housing bubble and accompanying gentrification.)

Now geography itself has melted away into meaningless in our era of cyberspace-enabled individuality. (See Cronenberg's 'eXistenZ' -- his shit will *always* bring you up-to-date.)


Chris





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