It’s strengthened it, and also created a vestigial, eccentric sort of personality. In a lovely touch, loneliness hasn’t stripped away the last of Wall-E’s sense of purpose. Meanwhile, the earthbound Waste-Allocation-Load Lifters (Earth Class) have long since run out of juice-save for one, who keeps patching his chassis with parts from his inactive peers, and whose utter isolation has had an unexpected effect.
(“Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space!”) Somewhere along the line, however, the plan failed and the ships were left to hover on autopilot in a purgatorial holding pattern.
Crucially, the whole plan has been packaged as a pleasure cruise: The passengers have been made to feel like tourists rather than refugees. Back on the ground, specially programmed drones methodically clean up the mess to set up an eventual homecoming.
(Here, director Andrew Stanton and his cowriter, Jim Reardon, are being generous with their timeline.) As a Band-Aid solution, the ruling authorities-a corporation rather than a governing body-have sent the entire population into space in a fleet of massive, AI-guided spacecraft. The film’s premise is that several hundred years into the future, the planet has become uninhabitable. The Best Pixar Character Bracket: The Elite Eight No, Really: Just Who Is Buzz Lightyear in ‘Lightyear’? What Happened With ‘The Good Dinosaur’? It’s like an unofficial adaptation of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which imagined how the Earth’s environment might respond-and recover-if its most industrious tenants were to suddenly vanish all at once. If the Toy Story trilogy is about inanimate objects who yearn to be human-or at least to share in human rituals- Wall-E uses civilization as a structuring absence. The running joke of post-millennial grown-ups happily rendered obese, compliant, jacked-in slaves to their own immersive virtual technology rhymes closely with the setup of Neveldine/Taylor’s vicious sci-fi thriller Gamer, released one year later in both movies, people have been reduced to ghosts in their own machine.
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The question is how to square that mission with a film like Wall-E, which not only unfolds in a post-apocalyptic landscape dotted with degraded traces of corporate logos but also blatantly satirizes the idea of a passive, infantilized populace in need of liberation from their own entertainment devices.įor the most part, the messages of Pixar movies can be distilled into a series of universal truisms or easily parsed, essentially comforting mantras: “Anybody can cook” “Just keep swimming” “You’ve got a friend in me.” Whether or not Wall-E is Pixar’s best film-and there’s a strong case to be made that it is-it’s almost certainly the studio’s weirdest and most troubling. The sight gag of a middle-aged baby learning, literally and figuratively, to stand for something is broad enough to enfold Neil Armstrong and Stanley Kubrick, but it’s also sharply and unexpectedly double-edged in the context of Pixar’s crowd-pleasing mandate-the closest that the 21st century’s preeminent dream factory has ventured toward autocritique.įor over 25 years, the studio’s armies of animators have demonstrated a Spielbergian knack for eliciting big, broad, universal feelings-with clockwork precision, their movies awaken the child within. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Late in Wall-E, the captain of the Axiom starliner tentatively puts his best foot forward, rising heroically in sync to the ascendant notes of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” gathered below, the crew and passengers-clad in onesies, like their leader-cheer wildly. Check back throughout the week to vote for your favorite characters and read a selection of stories that spotlight some of Pixar’s finest moments. At the heart of the occasion is the Best Pixar Character Bracket, a cutthroat tournament to determine the most iconic figure of them all. Ahead of the release of Lightyear, The Ringer is hosting Pixar Week -a celebration of the toys, rats, clown fish, and more that helped define one of the greatest studios of the 21st century.
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