WALL-E (2008) was nominated for six Oscars for Best Writing-Original Screenplay, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures-Original Score, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures-Original Song (for the song "Down to Earth"), Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, Best Achievement in Sound Editing, and Best Animated Feature Film of the Year. It won Best Animated Feature Film of the Year and the director, Andrew Stanton, accepted the award. The film received 94 awards from 2008-2021 when added to the National Film Preservation Board. As mentioned earlier, the movie was directed by Andrew Stanton. You remember that name, right? He also directed Finding Nemo (2003) and co-wrote all four Toy Story movies. Fun fact, Stanton directed two episodes of Stranger Things in 2017 (season 2 episodes 5 and 6). I'm a big Stranger Things fan, so I wanted to include that little tidbit of information. WALL-E was inspired by the rise of Amazon and Apple, consumerism, and environmental news.
The movie featured the voice of Ben Burtt as WALL-E as well as the voices from Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, the late Fred Willard, MacInTalk, and Sigourney Weaver for the supporting characters. WALL-E is set in the distant future, where a small waste-collecting robot accidentally embarks on a journey to space that will decide the fate of humanity. Ranking at 62 on the IMDb Top 250, the story follows many strong messages that children will not usually pick up on. However, the movie makes abundantly clear the danger our Earth faces with the current climate crisis. What does the film, WALL-E, tell us about the environment and environmental action that should be taken?
After humans pollute Earth to an unlivable state, they flee the planet in a giant resort spaceship, leaving robots like WALL-E to clean up the world after them. The tiny robot then discovers a plant growing in the trash and places it in a boot. The plant gets commandeered by EVE and taken to the spaceship for further inspection, sparking a journey of a lifetime for baby WALL-E. The film criticizes consumerism and capitalism as it leads to the planet's destruction, specifically with the fictional monopoly "Buy and Large," a department store similar to Target or Walmart. The company's CEO also happens to be the President of the United States, illustrating a "dystopian" government focused on market success and business growth. Showing no remorse for damaging the planet. It sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? The movie's driving goals seem to be following the Egocentric ethic. The ethic follows the idea that humans had become so obsessed with consumerism that they exploited the resources to the point where there was no nature, just human survival among a giant corporation.
When the plant is introduced to the humans on board the ship, it motivates them to leave their consumerist lives and return to a new-and-improved Earth, absent of their past egocentric values. The Captain leads the humans to return to an agrarian society and eliminate the waste that polluted the planet before. This ethic would be described as Green Romanticism: the idea that opinions and values of humans should be changed and that doing so would save the environment. The complete opposite of the Egocentrist ethic. Green Romanticism argues that once humans can escape the stronghold grip of consumerism, their values will change to support the return of life to Earth and save the environment.
Something that the movie lacks, however, is the middle ground. The two ethics (Egocentrism and Green Romanticism) are polar opposites. The film fails to find the middle ground between capitalism and environmentalism. Gotcha there for a second, didn't I? Of course, this movie criticizes capitalism, and rightfully so. It's one of the first eloquently written criticisms of capitalism made for children (by the giant corporation, Disney) in a bite-size and digestible format. For adults, we have complex movies like Parasite (2019), American Psycho (2000), and The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013) that examine and critique consumerism and capitalism; however, for children, you don't often find these types of movies past Studio Ghibli (whose market is primarily focused in Asia, not the West). Overall, I loved the movie. This was my second time watching it, but it was so long ago that it felt like I was watching it for the first time. I believe that it is among the best Disney/Pixar movies ever created, and I wish we had more films like WALL-E.
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