Sunday, May 16, 2010

Wall-E


From the Director of Finding Nemo, comes another heart-warming animated film Wall-E, the story of a robot and a dying earth. Director Andrew Stanton did complete justice to his concept with mind-blowing computer animation. Despite the robots not having actual human voices, but communicating only with body language and robotic sounds, the film has managed to convery its message quite strongly.

Wall-E is designed to clean up waste covered Earth far in the future. He is a small machine with wheels who scoops up garbage, shoves it in his belly to compress it into a cube and piles it up neatly in stacks. Year 2105 has bore the brunt of the rule of Buy and Large (BnL) Megacorporation which caused mass consumerism, covering the Earth with trash, leaving no clean space for humans to live. To resolve the problem, BnL created an army of trash compactor robots Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class) and evacuated all humans into space in a luxury star liner, “The Axiom”. Since the plan largely failed, humans had to live in space indefinitely, leaving a lone robot Wall-E cleaning all the trash. In the Axiom, the humans live with the help of machines - only.

Wall-E the lone robot, collects interesting things he finds in the trash and keeps himself alive by re-using the spare parts of other robots long gone. He has his own charming place to live, with all his treasures, and a TV that plays songs. He understands primate feelings such as love watching the gestures on TV. He is lonely, and keeps himself busy with his “work” and his close friend - a cockroach who he tames as his loyal assistant. Wall-E is almost human. Especially when he falls in love.

Eve is a delightful beauty Wall-E is enamoured by. She comes in a spaceship to Earth and Wall-E is simply smitten. The visuals are stunning. They introduce themselves with their names and nothing else and throughout the movie, they communicate only with the sounds of their names and expressions. There is no spoken dialogue between them. This makes the film so universal, especially with its planetary theme.

Lovelorn Wall-E follows Eve all the way back to space and enters a whole new world. We see people cruising on luxury seats, eating, talking and making merry. They are all fat and ugly and don’t walk. The machines do all the work for them, right from getting ready in the morning to transporting them around the “ship” for various other chores. They sip on a soft drink and are paralyzed on their chairs, completely dependent on their robots.

I recently watched the documentary “Super Size Me”, and simply cannot deny a similarity. While in Wall-E the director has gone a step ahead and shown us beautifully what could possibly happen to our world in the future, Super Size Me does not stay too far from the perception of the people shown in the Axiom. Supersizing everything around us, starting from ourselves, with supersized burgers, and cars and houses and buildings and machines to rule our lives, we simply become fat, lazy gluttons. Not to exaggerate it, but America is the fattest country in the world, and also incidentally one of the most developed. So what could be the deduction? Development is directly proportional to destruction? Possibly so.

The people living in the Axiom are excessively dependent on machines for their existence, with an air tv, air palm trees, an artificial beach, an umbrella shade that walks and opens when needed, with robots doing them up with make up and spa treatment, and with machines that help them brush their teeth and get dressed. Ironically, with the kind of lifestyles we have, we too are getting increasingly dependent on machines to live comfortably. It's interesting to note how our thoughts have evolved to deliberate visually and animatedly about the big debate - Man v/s Machines. Who will win the battle? Does the Captain of the spaceship have the power to rule over the machine who rules his life? We see this starkly when the captain struggles to overpower his robots who prevent him from going back to Earth. He has to learn how to walk! His only hope is the little green plant that Wall-E brings to space, which will allow them to live on Earth again.

Andrew Stanton, in his attempt to create a visual masterpiece, has succeeded in also teaching us an important lesson. If we don’t buckle up and try and save our planet by reducing wastes and avoiding products that are harmful to our environment, we are in for big trouble. We may find the consequences of our deeds too far away from our generation, but someday we need to take a step and give our trees a chance to let us live in dignity. Consumerism is taking away our right to live responsibly. The spaceship will rule us soon. That little speck of green will save our lives.

Watch it for its meaningful story, its lesson, its animation and most of all for Wall-E, for his adoring eyes and most human gestures, who in the end is our savior. He is our metaphor for change.

15 comments:

  1. well written. I especially liked the comparision you drew between Supersize Me and Wall-E.

    The only thing is that Supersize Me is about people getting fat because of rubbish food while Wall-E shows the people in Axiom as morbidly obese only because they don't engage in any form of physical work. But still, nicely done :)

    P.S. I still maintain that Stanton's previous film, Finding Nemo, is his best yet ;)

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  2. Thanks Anjanaa, appreciate your observations.

    The comparison is about the largely prophetic occurence of such a state in the world where we become incapable of any movement because of a certain lifestyle and undesirable habits. While in Super Size Me it's because of people eating junk food and getting minimal exercise, making them increasingly dependent on machines to move around (the author shows us an example of this where a person cannot walk because of his size), in Wall-E we see a distant yet very plausible connect to the chain of consequences. The statement in Super Size Me made about "depending on machines" itself is testimony to fears of what can eventually happen and is already happening. Also if you noticed, the people living in the Axiom drink what looks very similar to our coke bottles. So looks like they feed on junk too. And why are they out of the planet? Because Earth is filled up with junk! And living in the Axiom isn't any better to their healthy well-being. We are missing out on our rightful oxygen givers.

    What is important is for us to understand that our irresponsible behaviour in making choices will only harm ourselves and the world around us. Consuming products that are harmful to us will make us unhealthy and eventually helpless in saving our own existence. The Axiom seems to be the perfect example of what our future might be if we inflict such harm onto our systems, causing the doom of humanity.

    To wrap up in response to your P.S, I am a ardent fan of Finding Nemo too!:)

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  3. Impressive review, not only for the style & the relation you could find to another movie, but also for the route chosen. The Director’s empathy is well portrayed in your writing. I could imagine visuals after reading & a smile creased my lips twice, thinking about him being smitten & then going in search of his love ... :)

    As per the review, a better deduction will be that obesity is directly proportional to development :D

    The concluding paragraph is likeable. Well written and keep writing...

    Btw do read ‘Super Freakonomics’ if you get time.

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  4. Impressive review, not only for the style & the relation you could find to another movie, but also for the route chosen. The Director’s empathy is well portrayed in your writing. I could imagine visuals after reading & a smile creased my lips twice, thinking about him being smitten & then going in search of his love ... :)

    As per the review, a better deduction will be that obesity is directly proportional to development :D

    The concluding paragraph is likeable. Well written and keep writing...

    Btw do read ‘Super Freakonomics’ if you get time.

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  5. Thankyou Regil! Your deduction is definitely true, since obesity definitely cannot be inversely proportional to development! Fatness is a result of an abundance of resources, that keeps growing indefinitely, in direct relation to a person's size. So I guess since we are still "developing", we are still "healthy", although the phenomena is sweeping our Indian metros also.

    I have had a glance at the book. Will definitely read it when I get the time.

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  6. Definitely one of the most original and inspiring animations I have seen. Apparently, Stanton made the entire team watch all the films of Chaplin and Buster Keaton for inspiration to create a truly original piece of work. And it definitely shows.

    Did you notice the Ship of Theseus Paradox on WALL-E's identity?

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  7. @ Nabil: Nope. Could you explain it?

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  8. It reminds me of my encounter with an elite lady from Canada, a first class tourist in Parinirvan Express touring around Budhist sites in India. While in conversation, I mentioned about the revolution brought out by Bill Gates and Microsoft, opening up the software made available to vast populace and internet being inevitable to live by, she became emphatically rhetoric about the creation of mass waste he helped produce as PCs and accessories become obsolete in frequent succession. How to manage nuclear waste along with these technology waste is a matter of concern to human existence.

    Well, having said that, what is the resolve??

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  9. Precisely the unresolved issue. While we continue to exhaust our non-renewable resources, we also continue to accumulate the waste from our utilization of various goods in the name of technology. Are we not accountable for the consequences too?

    Now that there is more environmental awareness around the world, there seems to be growing a slow change in lifestyles and reduced use of environmentally harmful products. However, we have a long way to go. We love to consume, but do we stop to think who consumes the by-products of our happy lives? We have only one planet to live in now. Let's not wait for a Wall-E to scoop up our garbage.

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  10. to add: there is a natural cycling, a way the pollution being controlled by nature itself. For example, the CFCs emitted worldwide is so large to comprehend, but where are they accumulated to cause damage in the same amount? It is either dissipitated or recycled automatically by nature. The depletion of ozone layer too, compared to CFC emission is negligible.

    The pictures of glacier falls attached by global warming enthusiasts are a common phenomenon since the creation of earth, but only filmed recently to orchestrate for a cause; for what? the pupose does not seem tobe justifiable, for me!

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  11. Nature does seem to be kinder to us than we are to her. Like you said, pollution is controlled by nature to some extent and hence we don't see the otherwise astronomic consequences of our negligent activities.

    Yes, it does seem strange that what was always true of our earth now seems "inconvenient"? (Reference to "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore). Melting glaciers has been a phenomenon that occurs as a part of the Earth's cycle of existence since the beginning of time, but we seem to have a tendency to create a crisis when we have the technology to film an occurence, that may otherwise be normal.

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  12. i rarely use this word, unlike girls, but wall-e has to be one of the most 'cutest'animated charachter ive seen. and this film is so heart touching and warm...its like this robot has better understanding of human nature than we humans ourselves have! good review!

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  13. @ AKM: Rightly said. It sure is a very cute film in terms of the animation and character looks. It also stands equally strong in its theme and message. Humans seem to be a tad bit too ambitious for a harmonious life.

    Thanks!:)

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  14. Wiki: The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, or various variants, notably grandfather's axe (US) and Trigger's Broom (UK) is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

    IMDb: WALL·E, as a character, is a possible example of the Ship of Theseus Paradox. It's hinted that every single piece of the original WALL·E has been replaced by himself prior the story. This could be confirmed if it was made obvious the chip replaced by Eve at the end of the film contains WALL·E's personality, although the only thing we we know for a fact is it controls his power system.

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  15. @Nabil: Wow, that's an interesting piece of information! So does Wall-E retain his identity till the end? If that last chip did not contain his personality, would it nullify his original identity?

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