I watched Wall-E this weekend, and was quite impressed. Other than Cars, I've really enjoyed all of the Pixar movies since Monsters, Inc. Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird seem to be just about the only two animators left who leave real fingerprints on their movies. The trailers leading into Wall-E were a typical reminder of the vapid culture we're targeting towards our children. Disney seems to have simply given up, handing the entertainment reigns over to Nickelodeon, producing derivative and mundane films better suited to basic cable. This seems a bit inevitable in a world where television and film are largely equivalent in the way their users interact with them.
Bolt will surely be viewed on television screens at a ratio around 100:1. Anyway, the point is that it is always a pleasure to walk into a film that is genuinely interested in being watched in a theater and produced by people who seem to see their job as something worth caring about.
Wall-E has a very sophisticated machine aesthetic, which was the most interesting part of the film for me. The world is universally constructed from elegant inefficiencies. Through years of dull usability studies, our world has done away with buttons and rails and wheel-shaped autopilots while elsewhere
BnL was busy constructing a world without collaborative networking. Where crucial plot points hinge on one robot's ability to close a physical circuit on another robot by depressing an illuminated plastic button. Wall-E is a world without chording or workflow efficiency. Each task is discretely tasked to a single machine 'thread' responsible for little else. Their sum is the Axiom ship, piloted by the overly focuses Autopilot. Wall-E continues the Pixar tradition of rejecting simple moral struggles in preference of more articulated questions of choice, particularly between the good and the convenient. The Axiom is no more than the sum of various competing directives issued over time by the incoherent collective voice of human leadership. Different parts of the ship are effectively scripted into a competition to effect each of these tasks. The autopilot is at the mercy of its maker, his only ambition to ensure the pleasant journey of his passengers.
The most interesting struggle is the tension between will and determinism. Wall-E is the autistic extreme of this, spending his days recreating humanity's achievement in a pattern that contains enough hints of order to imply meaningfulness while denying any external utility or actual value. This is a rather perfect example of his need to follow orders, sense notwithstanding. His transgression into the world of free thought is not really a growth so much as the inevitable result of a thousand lifetimes of boredom. Manifesting first in an apparent interest in self-preservation, and finally in recognition of his own isolation.
EVE (as well as the Axiom crew), in contrast, seems to have been built with an unrealized potential for self recognition. Alternatively, they could have been simply able to achieve this growth more quickly than does Wall-E. But both are still beholden to the whims of the invisible hand of their function. For EVE, this means the shut-down following the execution of her task. For MO, this means the humorous obsession with the eradication of foreign substances.
Secondarily, the robots evolve themselves with the re-application of their names for use as language. Whether the lack of voice processing was oversight or calculation on the part of their creators, they never see these obstacles as insurmountable, which is a rather interesting type of programmed self-awareness.
Previous to Wall-E, I was firmly in the Brad Bird camp. I'll still rank Ratatouille and The Incredibles as the top two Pixar films, but Wall-E, and the new, more methodical Stanton are certainly edging up there.
Labels: movies
