WALL-E
Went to see WALL-E with James on Sunday. He got a little restless around the halfway mark when the popcorn ran out but was completely wrapped up in the ending.
I’m not going to summarise the story, if you haven’t already seen the film its Wikipedia entry does a pretty fair job. What fascinates me about the film is the way WALL-E is Pixar simultaneously pushing the boundaries and circling the wagons. Much like Disney when it started out, it uses state of the art animation to tell one of the oldest stories in the book. The true source of the film lies hidden in plain sight, embodied in the videotape of Hello Dolly, which is the brave little robot’s most prized possession. Despite copious visual references to Silent Running, 2001: A Space Odyssey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest both the story and themes of WALL-E hail straight out of the musical genre to which Hello Dolly was a late but quite archetypical comer.
To clarify, I’m not talking Hollywood musicals in general but the American folk history inspired subgenre exemplified by say Oklahoma!, Meet Me in St Louis or The Music Man. Musicals based not on fairy tale romances or putting on a show but on frontiersmen and white picket fences, the American West and Rockwellian small town living. These were musicals about communities and their environments, about families and finding that there’s no place like home. They were romances but the consummation of the romance wasn’t happy ever after for just one pair of lovers but for the whole community. Often through literally multiple marriages, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but also more metaphorically by uniting the farmers and cowmen of Oklahoma! or by realizing that St Louis already had everything New York could offer plus family as well.
Like Westerns these musicals often begin with a stranger coming to town. The stranger is an adventurer/ess charged with exotic new energy. He’s the cowboy Curly seeking Laurie’s farm-girl heart, the traveling con-man Professor Harold Hill of The Music Man or the maid posing as a sophisticated big city entertainer and brought to Deadwood by Calamity Jane. EVE fits the wanderer description to a tee but as with all her predecessors love transforms her and causes her to settle down. It’s not a one-way process though because her love in return brings a new kind of life to the homestead/planet, the crops are fertilised and the land is blessed.
Speaking of fertility, another preoccupation of folk musicals is with family - in Meet Me in St Louis, for example, the family relationship is massively more significant than Judy’s rather insipid romance with her boy next door. WALL-E begins as a boy meets (robot) girl love story but on board the AXIOM both they and the two humans they trigger the meeting of rapidly acquire (or in John and Mary’s case scoop up) a little troop of ‘children.’ More than that EVE’s internalization of WALL-E’s plant visually resembles a pregnancy especially when she’s being carted off, strapped to a trolley with anxious father in tow. Actually, the co-parenting of the plant with both mother and father taking turns to carry it in their ‘bellies’ is not only cute but kind of progressive.
Other common components of folk musicals are the bad guys, the often villainous antagonist to the hero/heroine’s romance and the patriarch whose blessing is required for their final union. Oklahoma has its Jud Fry, The Music Man its Mayor Shinn. In Hello Dolly villain and patriarch roles are united in the character of Horace Vandergelder and WAL-E, replicates this innovation with BnL president Shelby Forthright and his HAL-like Autopilots representing both the authority figure (the AXIOM’s captain is just a schlub like everyone else) and resistance to the return to Earth. However, in this retelling the patriarch is simply overridden and no blessing is required.
In that sense and in its creation of unconventional and non-biological family groups WALL-E does suggest that times have moved on since Hello Dolly was made. In other ways they haven’t, the movie is as nostalgic and against big corporations including the government as any of its predecessors.
Coda
James likes to watch to the end of the credits and the initial credits of WALL-E are pretty cool, both a riposte to the ending of 2001 and delightful in their own right. Most of the audience leave after that section and by the time the ‘thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple’ roll up James and I are the only people left in the theatre. Two cleaners come in, both black, and methodically start picking up the trash.
I’m not going to summarise the story, if you haven’t already seen the film its Wikipedia entry does a pretty fair job. What fascinates me about the film is the way WALL-E is Pixar simultaneously pushing the boundaries and circling the wagons. Much like Disney when it started out, it uses state of the art animation to tell one of the oldest stories in the book. The true source of the film lies hidden in plain sight, embodied in the videotape of Hello Dolly, which is the brave little robot’s most prized possession. Despite copious visual references to Silent Running, 2001: A Space Odyssey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest both the story and themes of WALL-E hail straight out of the musical genre to which Hello Dolly was a late but quite archetypical comer.
To clarify, I’m not talking Hollywood musicals in general but the American folk history inspired subgenre exemplified by say Oklahoma!, Meet Me in St Louis or The Music Man. Musicals based not on fairy tale romances or putting on a show but on frontiersmen and white picket fences, the American West and Rockwellian small town living. These were musicals about communities and their environments, about families and finding that there’s no place like home. They were romances but the consummation of the romance wasn’t happy ever after for just one pair of lovers but for the whole community. Often through literally multiple marriages, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but also more metaphorically by uniting the farmers and cowmen of Oklahoma! or by realizing that St Louis already had everything New York could offer plus family as well.
Like Westerns these musicals often begin with a stranger coming to town. The stranger is an adventurer/ess charged with exotic new energy. He’s the cowboy Curly seeking Laurie’s farm-girl heart, the traveling con-man Professor Harold Hill of The Music Man or the maid posing as a sophisticated big city entertainer and brought to Deadwood by Calamity Jane. EVE fits the wanderer description to a tee but as with all her predecessors love transforms her and causes her to settle down. It’s not a one-way process though because her love in return brings a new kind of life to the homestead/planet, the crops are fertilised and the land is blessed.
Speaking of fertility, another preoccupation of folk musicals is with family - in Meet Me in St Louis, for example, the family relationship is massively more significant than Judy’s rather insipid romance with her boy next door. WALL-E begins as a boy meets (robot) girl love story but on board the AXIOM both they and the two humans they trigger the meeting of rapidly acquire (or in John and Mary’s case scoop up) a little troop of ‘children.’ More than that EVE’s internalization of WALL-E’s plant visually resembles a pregnancy especially when she’s being carted off, strapped to a trolley with anxious father in tow. Actually, the co-parenting of the plant with both mother and father taking turns to carry it in their ‘bellies’ is not only cute but kind of progressive.
Other common components of folk musicals are the bad guys, the often villainous antagonist to the hero/heroine’s romance and the patriarch whose blessing is required for their final union. Oklahoma has its Jud Fry, The Music Man its Mayor Shinn. In Hello Dolly villain and patriarch roles are united in the character of Horace Vandergelder and WAL-E, replicates this innovation with BnL president Shelby Forthright and his HAL-like Autopilots representing both the authority figure (the AXIOM’s captain is just a schlub like everyone else) and resistance to the return to Earth. However, in this retelling the patriarch is simply overridden and no blessing is required.
In that sense and in its creation of unconventional and non-biological family groups WALL-E does suggest that times have moved on since Hello Dolly was made. In other ways they haven’t, the movie is as nostalgic and against big corporations including the government as any of its predecessors.
Coda
James likes to watch to the end of the credits and the initial credits of WALL-E are pretty cool, both a riposte to the ending of 2001 and delightful in their own right. Most of the audience leave after that section and by the time the ‘thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple’ roll up James and I are the only people left in the theatre. Two cleaners come in, both black, and methodically start picking up the trash.