I took my little cousins to see Kung Fu Panda over the weekend and was surprised that the message seems to be “you can be overweight or you can be lazy but you cannot be both.” It was a cute movie but DreamWorks included a few too many fat jokes for the moral of the story to be completely clear.
Such ambiguity will also be the case for Pixar’s Wall-E, which comes out on Friday. In it, the protagonist finds himself the last robot on Earth, when all the humans have left the planet due to a garbage avalanche they brought unto themselves.
Shooting himself in the foot, writer/director Andrew Stanton is a little vague about the cartoon’s environmental-stewardship themes:
“I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view — it’s certainly a good citizen way to be… It was like, ‘I gotta go with trash because I love what it does to my main character and it’ll be really clear.’ Then I had to go backwards from that: why would there be too much trash? Well, it would be really easy for me to get across we bought too much stuff, and it would be easy to explain, and it’s fun. It’s fun to be satirical like that. We all have that sort of Simpsons bent. I just went with what was somewhat true. I think we’ve always felt we have to be somewhat disciplined in that area.”
But it’s perhaps easy to understand why Stanton was hedging here: Pixar is a mass-marketing superpower.
For only $250, you can buy the remote-control Wall-E action figure — which will be available in time for Christmas. When kids aren’t busy making the world a better place, they can plop down in front of the plasma and exercise their thumbs on the Wall-E video game, available for Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2 and 3, and Sony PSP. You can carry your Wall-E lunchbox to school and at night, sleep under a Wall-E poly-blend comforter.
And this isn’t even recounting the junk associated with the Toy Story trilogy (the third one comes out in 2010), Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and so forth.
Pixar is not in the business of going green. It’s not in their interest. So why tell little children that consumerism is bad while pushing a load of useless crap down their throats?
This reminds me of Steven Spielberg, who chastises us for being to materialistic, when he is the creator of film mechandising tie ends.
Pixar? Seriously? Look, you guys. I have no problem with you slamming Paris Hilton and PETA and all those other lying bastards, but it’s really hard to maintain my naive, idealistic worldview if you’re going to make me look askance at frigging PIXAR!! C’mon. Can’t you leave me just that one little bit of innocence? For god’s sake, they made RATATOUILLE! LEAVE PIXAR ALOOOOONE!
/yeah, I know you’re right. But still…
Doesn’t Disney, and not Pixar, handle merchadising tie-ins? I might be wrong. Could someone clarify.
Aleric, or Vanity Fair putting out a “green” issue talking about the evils of consumerism while their mag is filled with ads for every trendy consumer product in existence.
Really? This is about consumerism? I couldn’t tell from the adverts. Mmm, you’re making me not want see this movie on principle, as opposed to the adverts which were making me not want to see this flick. The teaser trailer made me want to go but the more I see, the less I want to see. ::sigh:: Deceiver should have a non-hypocrite week or something …
Is that what its about? Wow. The commercials are really vague. Extremely hypocratic, don’t you think?
Wait till you see the humans show up to save Wall-E and they are of course grossly over weight, sticking to the stero type of the general every day consumer.
Article’s got it all wrong. Just the same way Disney did with Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, they do for Pixar films. THEY are the ones who manage (and overmarket) these films. The Disney Monster- that hulking, overbearing beast of a corporation. Pixar does one thing- they make really, really good films. Disney, also does one thing well- they mass market. Whether it’s destroying young girls by making them plastique faux-stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or whatever girl they shove out next, Disney is the ultimate predatory company. They have long since ceased to create anything quality on their own- witness the dismal failures of their movies like Chicken Little, and so they can only sustain their bloated, heaving mass by two methods. The first is to leech off their past. We’ve already witnessed the inane, disgusting messes that are the endless Disney sequels to their classic films. Cinderella II… III IV? The second method is to utilize their enormous sacks of filthy cash and BUY companies to do their bidding. Pixar, for example, was forcibly bought by Disney (which is why the grotesque monster of a company, despite doing absolutely nothing to earn it, now places its insignia next to Pixar’s on every film).
So don’t go blaming the small, beautiful striped fish for being eaten by the hagfish. Pixar is just an unfortunate side-effect of what happens when a company stays alive for too long.
However, it probably won’t be sh*t-E and will make a lot of mon-E.
That was both Funn-E and Snark-E.
Nothing like a little computer-generated sanctimon-E.
Beautiful movie. I highly recommend seeing this with family. That being said, it’s JUST A MOVIE! Fun-filled and entertaining. I don’t have to be embarrassed to take my young cousins, so I’m just grateful and pleasantly surprised entertainment like this still exists this day and age…