I used to assume Pixar films would always centre their narratives around some sort of basic childhood fear or parental paranoia (usually involving abandonment issues), but in recent years Pixar has attempted to distance themselves from these mildly manipulative scenarios and instead concentrated their considerable talents upon envisioning various distressing and disheartening dystopias. By doing so the company has achieved some extraordinary results that simultaneously fuse together charming entertainment with modest social critique.
Their latest film, WALL-E, continues this recent trend by taking our consumer-driven culture to some incredibly unsettling extremes, though a great deal of their social critique is camouflaged within a robot love-story, which somehow manages to integrate an appreciation for mushy musicals. The film is also one of Pixar’s more audacious creative efforts considering it evades issues involving family dynamics and commences without a great deal of dialogue. Actually, even when the first few words are spoken, they’re kind of inaudible. The difficulty in discerning the dialogue actually may not be the film’s greatest obstacle, as the filmmakers have included a few darker touches (the robot psych-ward was kind of disturbing) and I’ve already heard complaints about the tweaking of the accepted Pixar-formula by blending a few schmaltzy techniques that appear lifted from the maudlin romantic-comedy playbook (the complaints I heard so far are a bit blunter than the words I’m using).
While I do agree that some of the song cues sound a bit too calculated and I might have chosen a different musical for Wall-E to be obsessed with, I have to say Pixar has long relied upon sappy songs to achieve their signature emotional resonance and I’ll admit that I believe them to be one of the few contemporary filmmaking crews capable of wielding such sentiment within specific scenes without ultimately weakening their final product. In fact I must say that I was mesmerized with a few sequences within the film, which rarely happens anymore.
Instead, what I found weird was the integration of live-action footage with the usual computer animation. Perhaps it was a necessary decision considering the filmmakers already needed to include live-action footage of Hello Dolly!, but even after the filmmakers provided an explanation for the creepy alteration to the human form that occurs over the centuries within the film, I still found that the inclusion of footage involving Fred Willard severely hindered, rather than enhanced, my ability to perceive this imaginary world as some extension of our own reality. Instead, the inclusion of live-action footage only highlighted the artificial nature of film, which seems to run contrary to the filmmakers’ intentions, since the film’s primary observations seem squarely aimed at our current culture. Still, this lapse seems trivial in comparison to film’s other substantial achievements.
As an aside, in terms of the demographic breakdown of the audience, I was definitely the outlier at the matinee screening I attended. It felt like every grandparent in my city decided to take their grandkids to see this movie. Oddly there was little reaction from either demographic during the screening and I’m not exactly sure which age group was more likely to have been sleeping through the movie.
by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: Walt Disney Studios 35mm print
02 Jul 2008 5:14 PM | Submit Comment