The Cutest Indictment of Humanity You Will Ever See

After the lovable exploits of Remy the rat were immortalized by Pixar in their previous film Ratatouille, I thought they had scaled their tallest mountain. After watching their latest offering, WALL-E, it seems they’ve found a taller mountain and already reached the summit. Director Andrew Stanton humanizes the loveable loser-bot and manages to craft a wonderful love story-cum-message picture which will have viewers questioning society as it currently stands.

WALL-E (or Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class), which takes place 700 years in the future, is the story of a robot who spends his days making cubes from the trash that covers the barren earth. One day a spaceship lands and a new robot enters his life. EVE (or Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) arrives and WALL-E quickly goes from curious to enamored. To impress her, he shows her a plant that he found while rummaging among the earthen ruins. As her primary objective is to find plant life, she stashes the plant in a midsection storage cavity and goes into a coma-like state until a ship comes to retrieve her. As WALL-E has no intention of losing his new friend/love interest, he grabs on and rides the ship back to its “mothership”, The Axiom. There he discovers a colony of obese humans and the machines that make life easy for them. Through various mishaps and robotic saboteurs, WALL-E has to help EVE get the plant specimen to the captain, so the humans can initiate their return to earth.

While on the surface, this sounds like a fun children’s movie (and it is plenty of fun), it’s also Pixar’s preachiest film to date. The largest issue the film addresses is that of environmental concerns. In the future, society apparently litters like the dickens, hence the need for the WALL-E units. It is their objective to clean up the planet while all of humanity is aboard the Axiom. During the initial sequence where the film follows WALL-E during his day-to-day routine, earth is nothing but refuse and wasteland and the color scheme of the film reflects as much. Various shades of brown run rampant, but aside from the faded hues of Buy-N-Large Corporation (insert rimshot here) products or advertisements, there is no real color to speak of. When WALL-E happens upon the plant, the green almost reaches off the screen and slaps you with its vibrancy. Red is to Sin City as Green is to WALL-E. This dramatic visual change emphasizes the important role that the plant will play in the film before EVE is even introduced into the film.


The earlier Pixar feature Cars was too one-note in its message of corporations killing small businesses. While WALL-E takes this issue and goes even further with it, they don’t continually harp on it. In the film, the B-N-L corporation achieved global domination. This in itself is a harrowing thought as this says that not only is a hegemonic state possible, but one needn’t even be a country to achieve it. Another dire conclusion which can be drawn from this is that we as a nation are so enmeshed in consumerism, that we would allow a corporation to take over as our national form of representation. Any way you look at it, the situation is grim. And this bleak scenario is wordlessly raised in the first five minutes of the film.

In WALL-E, literally every human shown in the current era (live-action Fred Willard is excluded as his character was pre-recorded 700 years before the events of the film) is obese. The people all get around via mobile chair units which take them wherever their hearts desire aboard the Axiom. While riding, they don’t even have to interact with the people in their immediate vicinity because each chair comes complete with holographic projector screens which are directly in front of the face of the rider. The only thing that occasionally distracts the rider from their screens is the garishly intrusive advertisements that inundate the ship (think talking jumbo-tron billboards). This amalgamated commentary tells us that 1) people are obese due to a sedentary lifestyle which we seem to be doing nothing about, 2) the proliferation of electronic devices is detrimental to us (see point 1), and 3) consumerism consumes us. This is apparently Pixar’s less-than-subtle elbow to the ribs that we should perhaps look at how we are living (too bad we can’t feel it through our fat rolls…).


The film also presents the scenario that humanity has been dehumanized. WALL-E has apparently developed some sort of sentience which gives him a penchant for Rubik’s cubes and VHS copies of Hello, Dolly! (or in other words, a personality). He and EVE both display individual personalities. But once the “humans” are introduced, they are shown to be a uniform mass of obesity and consumerism with no discernable differences between one and another (with the exception of the captain whose duties preclude that he be differentiated, though only slightly). It’s a sad thought that the most human character shown in a film with plenty of people in it is a robot. The only way that the humans are re-humanized is when WALL-E interacts with them on a personal level. Usually, he clumsily runs into their hover chairs and, in a folksy apology, offers his hand and his name. There are three characters that WALL-E particularly interacts with that become re-humanized: two passengers (who end up saving a litter of children from doom) and the captain. The revelation of the captain’s re-humanization is particularly satisfactory for those viewers well-versed in film. As he confronts the ship’s Autopilot, Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” begins to play in a nod to Kubrick’s glorious 2001: A Space Odyssey letting us know that the captain has officially achieved the status of “human.”

WALL-E is enjoyable on the level of a fun animated movie where robots talking with nasally electronic voices and get into all kinds of hijinks, shenanigans, tomfoolery, and other forms of misadventures. It’s also the story of the love that develops between WALL-E and EVE. And while a viewer can see it at that level and stop there if they so choose, they would be shutting themselves out of a wealth of social commentary that Pixar has taken the liberty to point out. This is Pixar getting up on their soapbox and telling the world to make some changes. I’m just amazed that they were able to make their rant to the country this much fun.

by Jacob Shoaf

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A Storybook Statement

Since 2D animation has gone to the wayside, the Disney company, and even the Disney brand of children’s film, has had a tough time adapting. While the partnership with Pixar gives them a link to the most powerful (in every sense of the term) children’s entertainment in the world, the true Disney films (“Treasure Planet,” “Chicken Little,” “Home on the Range”) have been marred by stupid plots, second-tier animation, and completely unequivocal success compared to the older films. The 21st Century and the digital age has required a shift in cinema that Disney animation has yet to make. However, with the new film “Enchanted,” it seems like Disney has recognized their product for what it is, was, and, seemingly, always will be. “Enchanted” is self-aware of the Disney history, but uses it as a pastiche that not only serves as one of the strongest Disney films in years, but also a signal that Disney may have figured out how to transfer their product into the digital age.

Starting out in the 2D animated, 4:3 aspect ratio of the Disney days of old, “Enchanted” is recognizing its history and playing with the modes of production and their general plot lines. Giselle (Amy Adams) is a beautiful young lady who lives in the forest and sings to the animals about finding her true love, which can only be recognized through “true love’s kiss.” Prince Edward (James Marden) hears the song and goes off to find Giselle. She falls into his lap while he sits on his horse, they kiss, and vow to be married the next day. However, Edward’s stepmother, the evil Queen Narcissa (Susan Sarandon), wants to keep her throne forever so disguises herself and pushes Giselle into a well where she is sent to a place with no “happily ever afters”: modern day New York City. Giselle, in full wedding attire, rises from the sewers into the widescreen New York City where she immediately misses the courtesy and kindness of her fairly tale land of Andalasia. She gets lost and ends up in Bowery, where she is found by an engaged divorce attorney Robert (Patrick Dempsey) and his daughter. He sympathizes with this poor confused woman and takes her to his apartment.


This plot description is only necessary in noting that from step one onward, the same Disney pattern is being followed even in the live action world. Any astute viewer can predict where the film is going to go and what is going to happen, but if you get caught in this trap of plot it is easy to overlook the smart changes in the Disney message and the updating of their own ideology for the new age. The general complaint about Disney films is that they never apply to real life and the film’s engender some sort of ideology in young woman that they must be thin and beautiful to ever find their Prince Charming. While “Shrek” has notable played with these ideals, it continues to push the same messages. In “Enchanted,” true love is still found in the real world, but only in realizing that there is more to love than what is found in the animated fairy tale world’s Disney has proposed in the past and in Andalasia. “Enchanted” still does very much to present Giselle as a typical princess, but this is only used to play off of their prior films. The underlying message shifts, which in turn should change the way that the proposal of Giselle’s character, a young woman who has to recognize the ways of the real to find true love and get her “true love’s kiss”, as a role model is no longer troubling, as Disney critics of past films have found.

Updated messages and changing philosophies aside, there is so much joy to be found in “Enchanted” that it is difficult, unless you are a total cynic, to not fall under its spell. Amy Adams real-life fairy tale princess is played with a fancy-free attitude that can turn on a dime with the recognition of the darker forces in the world (i.e. divorce.) Adams is beyond perfect in the role and carries the film on her tiara and dresses made of curtains. James Marsden and Patrick Dempsey play along very well, especially in the recognition of the musical elements that somehow don’t make sense to Robert. Giselle’s musical number in Central Park and her calling to the creature’s of the city to clean her new home are two of the best sequences you will see in any movie this year. As if there were any question about it, Adams proves herself fully capable of being a strong leading lady. She displays such a simple grace in her performance, all the while creating such a strong sense of character. As obviously formulaic as “Enchanted” is, and, indeed, is supposed to be, Adams’ great performance helps the audience in recognizing the playfulness of the film and helps it, dare I say, transcend to greater heights. Given her Oscar nomination, but snub all the same, for the wonderful “Junebug,” and an Oscar worthy turn in “Enchanted,” Adams should be fully solidified as a goddess in the acting world (and the love of my cinematic life.)


Maybe the most noteworthy and radical message that comes from “Enchanted” is in the final act where Giselle, who has received true love’s kiss and been revived from a deadly apple, has her final battle with Princess Narcissa who turns herself into a giant, ragingly digital dragon. Giselle climbs the tower in the real world to defeat the digital dragon who has now plagued the animated world of Andalasia and the real world of New York. It is only when the digital dragon has been conquered that the characters can return to the 2D fairy tale land and others can finally find peace and true love and happiness in the real world. If that isn’t a statement on Disney’s major faults and their continuing battle to update and revise at the start of the 21st century, then I don’t know what is.

by James Hansen
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