Some ‘WALL-E’ stuff
A couple of readers recently posted “WALL-E”-related questions that warrant attention…
I don’t know much about the Oscars, but are animated films eligible for best picture? (I’m thinking of “Wall-E” here obviously).
Yes, any type of film is eligible for Best Picture, including types for which there is also a special category, i.e., animated films, documentaries, and foreign films. Only one cartoon, “Beauty and the Beast,” has ever been nominated, though, and the addition in 2001 of the Best Animated Feature category kind of ghettoizes cartoons, in my opinion. Academy voters figure, “Oh, we don’t have to bother considering the animated films for the top honors, because they have their own special category over here.”
But the fact is, animated films are often among the very best movies of any kind in a given year, and there’s already talk that “WALL-E” might break through the barriers and get a Best Picture nomination. At any rate, it’ll definitely win the Best Animated Film category.
Can it be nominated in both categories? Yes.
Should anyone be interested in the actual official rules for the Oscars, they can be found here.
Hey Eric, just wondering why you felt better about “WALL-E” than “Cars.” Here’s a quote from your “Cars” review:
“So what’s the problem? It’s hard to feel affection for the characters. They’re machines. Pixar films have often attributed human qualities to non-human things — fish, monsters, bugs, toys — but at least they were biological creatures (or, in the case of “Toy Story,” playthings in the shape of biological creatures). Cars are just cars. Even with eyes on their windshields and front grilles that look like mouths, and despite having personalities and ambitions and quirks, they’re still just machines.”
So what did “WALL-E” do better to allow you to feel affection for the talking machines? Is it the fact that they’re not real-life machines, or something else?
I dunno. For whatever reason, the “WALL-E” robots were more compelling to me than the “Cars” cars. Part of it is probably the design: WALL-E is simply a cuter, more sympathetic-looking creature than the automobiles were. But a more important factor is probably the story surrounding the characters. The plot of “Cars” is a familiar one; we’ve seen city slickers learn from humble yokels lots of times in other movies. The story in “WALL-E” is more original and more emotionally engaging. And when you think about it, part of what makes WALL-E so endearing is his situation. I suspect we might have adored him even if he weren’t drawn so cutely, just because of the predicament he’s in.
Finally, here’s something I wrote at Film.com that may be of interest: “Relax, People — the ‘Message’ in ‘WALL-E’ Is Harmless.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
At the (normally) quite liberal Cartoon Brew blog, they posted a link to the “Christianity Today” interview with Andrew Stanton. Immediately, posts by concerned self-proclaimed liberals turned up, upset and angry that they had watched a cute robot movie that was really an innately evil, stupid piece of Christian propaganda. Several vowing to never watch an Andrew Stanton film again, and stating they’d warn others away from this and any of his future projects.
It’s not only the “liberal hating conservatives” who need to chill.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
So I wonder who will be more put off… The conservatives who don’t appreciate the environmental damage humanity is causing… or the liberals who except, love, and defend everything and everyone except white christians…
July 8th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
One thing that Wall-E is definately showing me is that people either love it or hate it. My wife and her sister both think that it didn’t have much plot, and they didn’t like the “environmental” messages. Then there are the people who are finding hidden messages relating to the bible and commercialism. What a powerful film it is.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I agree with Eric, the robots in ‘WALL-E” are definitely more sympathetic than the cars in “Cars”. The robots are vaguely humanoid. They have identifiable heads and bodys, as well as more expressive features like eyes, and in WALL-E’s case, hands and fingers. Cars are just…well, cars. You can stick eyes on a car and make the grill look like a mouth, but you still won’t make it look even remotely human, which I think is a major factor in finding them sympathetic.
Personally, I can’t wait to see what Pixar comes up with next. You definitely have to give them points for guts.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I wasn’t very engaged by “Cars”, which I consider the weakest Pixar to date. I think part of what bothered me about the movie was the odd fact that it presented us a world that was in every way just like our world, except in place of humans (and any other animal life, for that matter) we have living cars. Why did this bother me? I don’t know, but it made me wonder about things. Car models seem to match their real world counterparts, so were there “Cars” before the 20th century in their world? If there were never any humans, why would living cars design their world to look just like ours? Why are there fields of crops when cars don’t need to eat agricultural products? Were there humans once, and the cars replaced them, perhaps through a brutal revolution and complete genocide? Stupid questions to ask oneself when I should be having fun watching a movie, but I was distracted with thoughts like that. The Wall-E machines may be machines, but they exist in relation to humans, not independent of them, so I doubt I’ll feel the same creepy distraction when I finally see this movie.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
“Cars” started up a creek without a paddle, in my book. If you have a vehicle that’s anything like mine, you don’t have much affection for them in the first place.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
True that, husband-of-mine! Our car makes me hate everything.
However, I haven’t seen Cars, so I can’t offer an opinion. When I mentioned it to Andrew, he said he didn’t like it all that much, so I never bothered.
July 8th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
“The plot of “Cars” is a familiar one; we’ve seen city slickers learn from humble yokels lots of times in other movies. The story in “WALL-E” is more original…”
Meh, I don’t know about that. Sure, we have seen city slickers learn from humble yokels lots of times in other movies. Heck, “Cars” basic outline is identical to “Doc Hollywood,” (much like Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” is identical to “The Three Amigos,” but I digress).
My point is that “Wall-E”’s environmental storyline, albeit harmless, is hardly original. I won’t even bother listing how many “future of the human race” sci-fi films ALONE have mined this concept, much less movies in general.
I think it comes down to this - “Wall-E” really did it for Eric. More than “Cars.” There’s not always a tangible explanation, and trying to find one sometimes only illustrates even more frustrating, logical inconsistencies with your feelings. That’s the pesky thing about art. It hits us emotionally, each of us often in different ways, and for reasons we can’t always justify.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
“A Bug’s Life” is openly stated by Pixar to be partially be a comedic take on “The Seven Samurai” and it’s Western remake “The Magnificent Seven”…both which predate “The Three Amigos” by some years. It differs in more ways from the latter film then it does from the two former.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
The idea that Wall-E portrays humans as “bad” is plainly untrue; though sedentary, the human characters in the movie are unfailingly kind and considerate, even industrious when given the chance. There isn’t a “bad” human character in the film, though there are more than a few misguided ones.
July 9th, 2008 at 3:49 am
The movie did take a shot at Bush though. When the president said that the pilot should “stay the course” even though the iformation had changed. But besides that, it wasn’t very political.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Re: Wall-E. The people are fat because they consume nothing but prepared foods in the form of shakes. The people are not inherently stupid, and if they appear to be stupid, it’s only because their entire view of civilization is dictated to them, primarily through electronic media. We need to take better care of the earth or suffer the consequences.
Are people uptight with these “messages” because they are in an animated film? Are these messages only okay in films that are “supposed” to be taken seriously (i.e, R-rated films starring activist actors, independent films made by filmmakers who are starving for their art, or films labeled by their makers as documentaries)? Or are people uptight with these messages because they hit a little too close to home and are depicted in Wall-E in ways that make them seem like we could actually do something about every one of them if only we got off our butts?
Hmm.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Maybe people get upset because they feel attacked by the film. If I dumped all my garbage on the streets of the city and spewed inordinate amounts of toxic gas that killed all life into the air, I would feel personally attacked by this film.
Of course, some people feel guilty for shopping at Walmart, and they might feel attacked, too. But that’s because they’ve fallen pray to the peer pressure line that goes something like “if you shop at someplace cheap, it means you are a cheap person.” And everyone knows that “too successful” really translates to “evil” (see Microsoft, the New England Patriots, the United States, etc.). Of course, I don’t think the movie was making any of these points, but if you are really defensive about these points, you’ll take offense at anything anyone says that has a slight chance of being interpreted to be somewhat about it.
Some people are just so insecure.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I had the same problem with Cars as Duke of Earl Grey. It was set in a universe that was logically inconsistent and I just couldn’t ever get past that. It was a pretty prominent level of detail that I normally don’t expect the Pixar crew to miss. And so I spent the entire movie wondering why the various cars had seats, what cruel evolutionary process created these beings with no opposable digits and where do baby cars come from? Plus I didn’t think it was very funny.
I didn’t have any of these problems with the Toy Stories. Why? I don’t know. Leave me alone.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Wall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80’s style of course