{"id":597,"date":"2008-07-15T20:04:50","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T00:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=597"},"modified":"2012-07-24T19:19:33","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T23:19:33","slug":"walle-2008-andrew-stanton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/597","title":{"rendered":"WALL*E (2008, Andrew Stanton)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just spectacular&#8230; I loved every moment of it.  The politics\/message are a little heavy, but it was nervy to put such anti-consumerist, green, call-to-action messages into a non-talking robot-love movie in the first place (and to declare in interviews, as Stanton has, there there are no political messages in the film!), so I&#8217;m going to forgive.  Twenty years ago, Pixar would&#8217;ve been shot down as commies for making this movie (and Mike Judge would&#8217;ve been quietly executed for <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/102\">Idiocracy<\/a><\/em>).  Hopefully I&#8217;m going to see this again soon, so no need to go into plot summary.<\/p>\n<p>I caught the bunch of <em>2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> references (evil autopilot is very HAL, some of the same music is used) but I also found myself thinking of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/180\">Children of Men<\/a><\/em>.  Future Earth is void of new life, new life is then discovered in the belly of a female-ish character, everyone freaks out and gets excited but a bunch of sinister characters want to manipulate the situation.  It all checks out.  Movie is also getting compared to <em>Alien<\/em> (sigourney weaver&#8217;s voice is the &#8220;mother&#8221; ship) and <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/7631\">Silent Running<\/a><\/em> (another post-earth outer-space plant-tending movie), but not <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/346\">Sunshine<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Peter Gabriel, who has a history of song contributions to films about sentient critters (<em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/223\">Gremlins<\/a><\/em>, <em>Babe 2<\/em>) scores the closing credits with an obvious-sounding number about being down in the ground.<\/p>\n<p>Fred &#8220;Wha&#8217;happen&#8221; Willard plays a president stand-in, the CEO of Buy &#8216;n&#8217; Large.  He&#8217;s not even animated &#8211; just videos of Fred Willard.  If he&#8217;s the first live actor in a Pixar animation, they picked the right actor.<\/p>\n<p>The opening short was <strong><em>Presto<\/em><\/strong> by first-time writer\/director but long-time Pixar animator\/artist Doug Sweetland.  Very good, funny, fast-paced comic short about a magician and his magic hats and rebellious hungry rabbit.  More of that Looney Tunes gag-based anything-goes character humor than the usual style of Pixar short (think <em>Geri&#8217;s Game<\/em>, <em>Boundin&#8217;<\/em>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just spectacular&#8230; I loved every moment of it. The politics\/message are a little heavy, but it was nervy to put such anti-consumerist, green, call-to-action messages into a non-talking robot-love movie in the first place (and to declare in interviews, as Stanton has, there there are no political messages in the film!), so I&#8217;m going to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[198,455,383,457,454,21],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-apocalypse","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-fred-willard","tag-pixar","tag-robots","tag-shorts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7967,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/7967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}