[Ed. note - I promised some general pop-culture commentary. So let's start that trend off by paying tribute to nerds who know more than their bosses.]
If ever there was a marriage of convenience, it is that of Pixar and Disney. One had ideas, one had money, and they figured there would be no harm in combining those resources. As is often the case, cracks appeared.
The two companies clearly have differing opinions on what makes a good animated feature, and that becomes even more obvious whenever one of them releases a new movie. Over the last few years Disney’s animation department has become nearly irrelevant, while Pixar seems well on their way to becoming undisputed masters of the medium.
At this point in their relationship, I have to assume that Disney is growing quite uncomfortable with the beast they created. Pixar started out merely upstaging their parent company with prettier pictures, and have since moved on to films with smarter plots and more fully-drawn characters; true “all-ages movies” rather than “kids’ movies.” Now they’ve moved into viral marketing with a strong anti-consumerist tone.
Seriously, take some time to look at this site and bask in the insanity.
“Buy N Large” is a fictional mega-corporation that fits into the storyline of Pixar’s next movie, “WALL-E.” The concept is that Earth has been completely buried in the detritus of rampant consumerism (due mostly to the practices of companies like Buy N Large), so the human population migrates into space colonies, and a fleet of robots known as WALL-E’s (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class) is left behind to clean up the mess and make Earth habitable again. After 700 years, only one WALL-E unit remains active, and he’s struggling valiantly to clean everything up on his own, with little success. Meanwhile, the Earthlings have gone soft(er) after seven centuries of living the good life in space, becoming even more lazy, gluttonous, and materialistic than they were on their homeworld. That’s not even the plot of the movie, that’s just the premise.
Apart from that surprisingly dark concept (dark for a Disney property, at least), the other thing that caught my interest was the design of WALL-E himself (check out the trailer for a look at the little fella). Designers were instructed to “see it as an appliance first, then read character into it,” according to Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, who also joked, “I’m basically making ‘R2-D2: The Movie.’”
Is there even a market for WALL-E? I know I want to see it, and a few of my friends have expressed interest, but we’re a weird bunch of bastards.
The amusing part, which Horatio so astutely pointed out when I brought this up to him via e-mail, is that Disney isn’t going to do anything to stop this. From Horatio:
Disney is in an interesting position here. Generally just about any artist or company can get away with whatever they want, as long as they’re popular, successful, and profitable, which is why Trey Parker and Matt Stone can say absolutely anything they want on national television, and Viacom has to lick it up and meekly beg for more. [...] Any media conglomerate would give up half their holdings for a property like South Park, or for that matter, a property like Pixar. [...]
And whether they like it or not, Disney has accumulated a lot of social baggage. The Silent Majority Voters that make us so nervous make Disney nervous too, because they’re the ones who demand that Disney continue to serve up innocuous shit that can be put on the TV to babysit children without supervision.
Of course, Disney’s tried its hand at computer-animated features without Pixar’s assistance, with mixed results at best. That works in Pixar’s favor as well, not just by making them look good, but by providing some useful camouflage. Amid the sea of formulaic CGI crap produced by Disney and others (hello, Shrek!), it’s likely that weird little movies like WALL-E will slip unnoticed onto the DVD shelves of wholesome families nationwide. From there, it can go to work indoctrinating children against consumerism, and instilling in them an incurably nerdy love of robots.
Those kids sound pretty cool to me.
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