I never got around to writing a proper review of WALL•E, but I bookmarked some interesting comments on it over the summer, and I finished going through the bonus features on the Blu-Ray last night, so I figured I’d post something quick here — especially now that my friend and colleague Jeffrey Overstreet has posted an item at his website celebrating the film and inviting the celebrations of others, partly in reaction to my own mixed feelings about it.
In a nutshell, I find myself reacting to this film much the same way that I reacted to Edward Scissorhands (1990) back in the day: I really, really like the title character, but the movie itself is a bit of an awkward jumble. On the one hand, it has some beautiful visuals and inspired ideas, and on the other hand, its efforts to think outside the box sometimes don’t work, while on other occasions it never even tries to leave the box in the first place.
Suffice it to say that I think my take on the film, which I won’t re-hash in detail here, dovetails with that of Andrew O’Hehir, who recently wrote a post on the film called ‘What’s behind the ‘WALL-E’ cult?‘: It’s “a pretty good cartoon” and possibly “the third-best Pixar movie of the decade” (O’Hehir doesn’t say what the top two are, but I’d pick Finding Nemo and The Incredibles), but not quite the “masterpiece” or “best movie of the year” that a surprisingly large number of people have claimed.
That said, the Blu-Ray is certainly a delightful package. The bonus features are plenty informative, the brand new short BURN•E is pretty cute, and I love the retro video games. And my daughter, in particular, has become a fan of the film — or at least of the character — so this disc should be getting a fair bit of play here, and who knows, maybe my take on the film will change.
In the meantime, here are some excerpts from some of the more interesting articles and blog posts that I have held on to since the film came out five months ago. I don’t agree with everything written here, but I find it all fascinating to chew on.
Daniel Thomas, Conservations on Ghibli:
It’s exciting to watch. Pixar are now firmly into Phase Three, their Rubber Soul period. It’s much like the Second Miles Davis Quintet, which spanned the middle to late 1960’s. The period when Miles, the great American artist, kept pushing himself, driving his art into new and uncharted territory, desperate to outrun the competition, desperate to outrun his own famed reputation. And he was backed by the best band in the world, save one (The Beatles). The resulting albums evolved rapidly from the hard bop of ESP, to the abstract rock of Filles de Killemjaro, and finally to the great paradigm shift, the great break – fusion.
So where is Pixar driving towards? What is our end goal? I always point to the Japanese masters, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, but these are our teachers. The new paradigm will be something different, something new. I would die happy if Pixar could create something as sublime and masterful as Gauche the Cellist, My Neighbor Totoro, Whisper of the Heart, Omohide Poro Poro. But when Pixar finally breaks the barriers imposed upon American animation, the new paradigm will prove a surprise. It will be different. How? In what way? I can’t say. They must be willing to push themselves further than ever before, and push the audiences further than ever before.
Rod Dreher, Crunchy Con:
Took the kids to see “Wall-E” the other night. I expected a quality kid’s movie (this is Pixar, which sets the standard in these matters), and that I certainly got, though my eight year old enjoyed it much more than my four year old, I sense. What I didn’t expect, what I wouldn’t in a million years have expected, is a Pixar film that embodies a traditionalist conservative critique of modernity, one that advocates a more or less Aristotelian view of humanity and politics. Philosophically, this is one of the most subversive movies I’ve ever seen. Crunchy cons, this movie is for us. . . .
In the end, the robots — meaning the system — who run the Axiom see the presence of Earthly life among them (the sprig of a plant Eve has brought back) as a threat to their existence. We discover that the head of BNL had sent a prime directive secretly to Otto, telling him that returning to Earth is impossible, the place is too ruined, and if people should decide to go back there, he — Otto — wasn’t to let them. In a neat inversion of Genesis, the robot Eve is now bearing an “apple” — a temptation to the people to defy the prime directive of their false God, and to become human once again by choosing life, not mere existence.
In another twist on the Genesis story, “Wall-E” contends that what makes us human is labor. In the film’s most meaningful iconic image, the Tree of Life on the new earth grows out of an old work boot. You’ll recall that when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, Adam was cursed for his sin by being condemned to draw his sustenance from the very Earth from which he was drawn. God says to Adam, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:19) In “Wall-E,” humanity discovers that it can only complete its own given nature through labor — first agricultural labor, then the labor of building cities. You have to sit through the brilliant end credits to watch the future of civilization on Earth after the final scene of the film. You see that people renew the face of the Earth through their own labor, and by taking responsibility for themselves, instead of being passive consumers, wards of the corporate state.
What I found especially interesting about this epilogue is how it showed the robots from the Axiom helping humans rebuild civilization. See, “Wall-E” is not a Luddite film. It doesn’t demonize technology. It only argues that technology is properly used to help humans cultivate their true nature — that it must be subordinate to human flourishing, and help move that along. Where humanity got into trouble was allowing technology to exacerbate its own internal disorder — to alienate people from their labor, from each other, and ultimately from themselves. The film is wise enough to know that we can’t go back to a pre-technology state, so it says the best thing to do is to put technology in its proper place — which we can only do when our own souls and communities are rightly ordered.
Michael Gerson, Washington Post:
Some conservatives have dismissed “Wall-E” as a crude critique of business and capitalism. This is true only if capitalism is identical to boundless consumerism — a conviction that Adam Smith did not seem to share. Smith argued that human flourishing requires “good temper and moderation.” Self-command and the prudent use of freedom are central to his moral theory. And these are precisely the virtues celebrated in “Wall-E.” The end credits — worth staying to see — are a beautiful tribute to art and work, craft and cultivation.
“Wall-E” is partly an environmental parable, but its primary point is moral. The movie argues that human beings, aided by technology, can become imprisoned by their consumption. The pursuit of the latest style leads to conformity. The pursuit of pleasure displaces the deeper enjoyments of affection and friendship. The pursuit of our rhinestone desires manages to obscure our view of the stars.
James Poulos, The American Scene:
The actual film ends with the recolonization of Earth by humans and their robot friends. The credit sequence begins with a series of animated paintings that depict the rebooting and rebuilding of civilization, humans and robots working hand in hand. These paintings themselves change and develop with the pace of civilization; so humans and robots reinvent the plow in a little story portrayed by moving cave-drawings, rebuild structures together in a sequence that looks like a cartoon flipbook from 4000 BC, and so on. The process brings us quickly — but not too quickly — up to a recognizably modern but very bucolic world, where hero and heroine gaze happily on the seemingly eternal tree that’s grown from what was once the world’s last seedling.
Now, the latest thing to blow my mind about this sequence was the realization that these moving paintings could represent more than cool metaphors, and actually represent the paintings of the recolonizing humans themselves, for whom the relearning of art was just as integral to their recovery of their humanity (in the image of God, if you’d like to go there) as was the relearning of technology. Maybe, just maybe, this balance was, and is, integral to the stability and flourishing of human civilization, especially one that found itself with robots in its original position.
But this set of musings was an elaboration that loops back on the first thing to blow my mind about Wall·E‘s outro: in the narrative they chart out, history — and with it, art history — ends, more or less, with impressionism. The final image is performed in the style of Van Gogh, the culmination of a modern series of images that includes pointillism and such. Now, the chronology doesn’t have to be perfect for the glaring point to be valid: post-World War I styles, most notably Cubism, were absented from rebooted human history.
Yoni Goldstein, National Post:
But where others have noted the film’s blatantly obvious message about big business destroying our souls (and our potential for destroying the environment), what shocked me about WALL-E was how regular humans are portrayed: dumb. We have, according to the film, been duped in to an existence devoid of beauty and change, challenge and thoughtfulness by savvy marketers. We were too dumb, in other words, to stop ourselves from ruining ourselves. We were content to let slip away what makes us unique.
This brings to mind another recent movie with a similar message. The 2006 film Idiocracy is set 500 years in the future on an Earth near destruction because of a worldwide food shortage. And who’s to blame for the problem? Humans of course. Humanity, circa the 2500s, is so incredibly stupid that no one has any clue how to make food grow out of the ground anymore (they’ve been trying to irrigate with a Gatorade-like substance to no avail). The film’s protagonist, an average shlub who was frozen in the 2000s as part of a military experiment, then forgotten for 500 years, saves the day by reminding the future humans that crops need water (which they, because of a marketing campaign by the fake Gatorade company, associate exclusively with toilets) in order to grow. The stupidest of present-day humans is the smartest person in a world of idiots. And of course, he does save the day, and goes on to become president (replacing potty-mouthed president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho).
Both WALL-E and Idiocracy imply that we’re on a downward spiral, that we will soon become the impetus of our own destruction and that we are, or will be, too lamebrained to make a difference when push comes to shove. The happy salvations with which both films conclude are brought about by unnatural visitors to Earth — a robot and a present-day guy respectively — not the earthlings of the future, who would surely lack the mental and physical abilities to either save Earth or rebuild it.
Just a bunch of movies designed to prey on our fears, given the current debate over climate trauma? Maybe. But not so long ago, Hollywood films of the destruction-of-Earth genre tended to be about aliens, nuclear war, super-viruses or even wild animals gone crazy. It is curious that the trend seems to be shifting toward what is ultimately a more banal nightmare scenario. If we humans are ultimately to blame for the destruction of Earth — if we one day become too dense to stop ourselves from ruining our habitat and too vapid to want to do anything about it — well, that would be the scariest ending to a story I can think of.
Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times:
As World War II drew to an end, even the most outlandish futuristic scenarios — rocket travel, weapons of mass destruction, planetary annihilation — suddenly seemed possible. In the decades since, classic science-fiction movies have demonstrated that imagining the shape of things to come is too serious a task to be treated as mere child’s play. The Cold War and Atomic Age anxieties of 1956’s “Forbidden Planet,” the fears of artificial intelligence run amok in “2001,” the pending environmental meltdown foreshadowed in “Silent Running” and the threat of creeping dehumanization raised in “Blade Runner” (1982) helped establish science-fiction movies as being not simply gee-whiz entertainments for adolescents of all ages but valuable pop-culture portals for examining — and trying to counter-act — the dangerous tendencies of human behavior in the here and now.
To be sure, “Wall-E” does this too — up to a point. But in the end, the movie fails to meet the ambitions it sets for itself with the grim scenario it lays out in its opening minutes. And it finally sidesteps the most painful questions that nearly all serious science fiction must grapple with in one form or another: whether the human race is worth saving, and, if so, why. . . .
IN SERIOUS science fiction, humans who’ve degenerated into some sort of new mutation force us to confront the darkest sides of our nature. Think of the cannibalistic Morlocks and the feckless, sheeplike Eloi of Wells’ “The Time Machine,” one of sci-fi’s master narratives. By contrast, the Pillsbury doughboys and girls in “Wall-E” are a bit dim but otherwise sweet, polite, essentially harmless, kinda cute. They’re essentially blameless for their slovenly, debased condition, one of several ways in which the movie lets the audience off the hook. That’s ironic, given that the reason the humans in “Wall-E” have grown soft and flabby is because they’ve been infantilized, i.e. treated as big babies rather than as adults. “Wall-E” offers a sharp, funny take on the pacifying effects of Western consumer society, but the filmmakers soften their indictment by treating it mostly as a lighthearted visual gag (fat people falling off their motorized Barcaloungers). As a work of sci-fi cinema, “Wall-E” is comfort food disguised as a bitter pill.
Damon Darlin, New York Times:
“Wall-E,” the Pixar movie that took in $62.5 million over the weekend, is chock-full of references to Apple products. Perhaps that’s because Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, used to own Pixar before he sold it to the Walt Disney Company.
Ben Crair, New Republic:
Steve Jobs was CEO of both Apple and Pixar before he sold the latter to Disney in 2006, and one wonders if these references are like the small rebellions of a foster child longing for a former parent. Jobs learned early on that dystopias were fertile ground for Apple’s rebellious image: A famous 1984 Super Bowl ad proposed the Macintosh as the antidote to 1984-style totalitarianism. After years away from the company, Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and introduced the slogan “Think Different” (meaning, of course, “Think Apple”). WALL-E‘s Apple plugs are the latest evidence of how successfully Jobs has swathed his company in countercultural hipness. It is odd to see a film with authenticity as its subject embrace a corporation’s image-making so unquestioningly. The moviegoer whose iPhone interrupts the movie can rest assured that his device has no connection to the future portended on screen–after all, WALL-E–and WALL-E–are on his side.
Dystopias are parables. We recognize in their extremes the endgame of our own complacencies. WALL-E relies on this identification–the culture WALL-E safeguards is our culture, his objects are our objects. The distinction between the authentic and the artificial is a critical judgment, and conflation only abets the Buy N Larges. Without the iPod, without EVE, without the iBook chime, WALLE would be merely sentimental; with them, it’s compromised. A movie about the triumph of authenticity over artificiality shouldn’t also be an exercise in brand identification. Apple may please the filmmakers’ tastes more than Buy N Large and its box-store ancestors, but in the end, its corporate motives aren’t so different. The film’s problem is not that its message is too anti-business or too liberal, but that it doesn’t really believe in it. WALL-E may be about a future dystopia, but it’s a symptom, not a diagnosis.
Steven Boone, SpoutBlog:
WALL-E joins Shadow of a Doubt and On the Waterfront as another brilliant and devastating visual statement on American life dulled and softened by an overbearing orchestral score that says, “It’s only a movie, y’all. Have fun. Shrek it up. More popcorn!” The film’s mostly wordless first act builds a convincing world and lets the trash-compacting robot WALL-E wander yearningly through it (his loneliness in a world he never knew jibing with our wistfulness amid familiar ruins). Other than the old musical number WALL-E watches and imitates, Ben Burtt’s sound design is as much music as this segment requires. Along with the expected Pixar dynamism and grit, Burtt’s work makes WALL-E’s junkyard Earth a very real, menacing, strange and wondrous graveyard for the American empire.
This intense WALL-eyed subjectivity and naturalism-plus-reminiscence can hang with the greatest of Studio Ghibli animations (and early Pixar shorts). Ghibli directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata can make things like leaves and parasols weep and die real deaths. Burrt and Stanton do the same for our beloved 20th century gadgets. But Thomas Newman’s score emerges like clockwork at plot points to lend the film a more Dreamworks-ish sense of hectic postmodern showmanship. Party time, not story time. The film’s cluttered and increasingly talky midsection set on a space colony/resort/mall throws the party in full swing.
Finally, someone — I forgot who — suggested that there might be a connection of sorts between this film and E.M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops‘, which he wrote back in 1909.
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