Pixar’s Unauthorized Sequel
Just checked out WALL-E. It was a wonderful animated film, maybe the best one to date from Disney/Pixar.
It does something no Pixar film has yet done: mix live-action inserts into the realistically animated scenes. WALL-E, the incredibly cute robotic protagonist of the piece, has a job compacting garbage in the ruins of an abandoned city and stacking the trash cubes into immense towers. He spends his nights obsessively watching an ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly! (d. Gene Kelly, 1969). And not a CG-imitation version: the real thing, an actual clip of Michael Crawford and Marianne McAndrew (and interestingly, not Barbra Streisand: cheaper appearance residual payments!). Fred Willard also makes a sly on-camera cameo as an ineffectual George W. Bush type. The combination of live action, incredibly vivid computer animation and visual design assisted by Roger Deakins (The Coen Brothers’ favored DP) has resulted in a film that is at times breathtakingly beautiful and cinematic.
The first half of the story is stark and simple, a tale of a lonely robot meeting another one in a desolate cityscape. The second half takes place in a humongous spaceship in which humanity has escaped their polluted, used-up home planet. And as this half develops, I recognized a strangely familiar premise being presented.
WALL-E takes place 700 years in the future. Between now and this time, a large Costco or Wal-Mart like corporation called Buy-N-Large takes over everything everywhere. It’s hyper-consumerist ways eventually produce so much garbage, pollution and environmental degradation that its customers (that is, the human race) are ferried off-planet, leaving an army of robots behind to clean up. Meanwhile, the people on the ship have evolved into the ultimate consumers: Sessile blobs who cannot move off their floating couches, constantly staring at a video screen which floats in front of their faces, unaware of their very surroundings.
The Mike Judge film Idiocracy (2006: I reviewed it here a few months ago) painted an almost identical dystopian scenario three years ago (it got delayed a year in release). In the future of Idiocracy the story actually gets into gear when the protagonist’s suspended-animation casket is delivered via an avalanche from an immense tower of trash. There are more companies in existence in this universe than in WALL-E’s, but a centerpiece location is a gigantic Costco, so vast it stretches off into the horizon and so cavernous crashed planes stick out of it. Brawndo, a sports-drink manufacturer, also figures into the plot, as a corporation so large they bought the FDA and basically replaced all sources of drinkable water with its beverage.
Future humans are basically represented the same way in both films: hyper-consumers who have become hopelessly dependent on the machines that keep them alive. And the point of depicting them as such is the same in both films: these pampered, infantile, soft people are obviously us. These two films look so much alike in some scenes they could conceivably be the same storyline. Idiocracy is part 1, before the Earth is evacuated: WALL-E is part 2, after we’ve taken off for space.
But there are differences, mostly in the attitude of the filmmakers. Mike Judge is cynical: We are a stupid, doomed race, and the efforts of the relatively smart, present-day hero to save humanity only delays our inevitable extinction. The folks at Pixar believe people are basically good and kinda smart, and the creative efforts of robots and humans alike are a constant source of hope.
Legend has it WALL-E is the final project generated at a single idea session at Pixar, one that also generated Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. No doubt that may be so, but the details look a lot like something from a 3-year-old failed satire.
–Skot C.