Wall-E

[vakkotaur]

I finally saw Wall-E today. If you can suspend disbelief enough, it works as a robot love story (which sounds just plain weird, I know. This is not a Shields and Yarnell or Saturday Night Live bit, even if sounds like it could be). I have a disagreement or two with some analysis of the film, which I'll get to. By now most know the general

Comments

[nefaria]

I'm worried that Hollywood is overloading kids with an age-inappropriate message about pollution.

When I was a kid, we saw that Indian shedding a tear as he walked across a littered landscape. The commercial asked me not to litter, and I don't litter.

Nowadays, kids are taught that global corporations are responsible for polluting, and it's the kids' job to stop them. As they grow older, they found out they're powerless to stop the polluting corporations, so they get frustrated and eventually tune out the anti-pollution messages. And they start littering.

It unnerves me when Hollywood tries convincing the audience to do the impossible instead of something reasonable.

[vakkotaur]

Sort of a Captain Planet (Side) Effect: "Hey, I don't have superpowers, I can't really do anything."

I do recall that commercial. And the "Give a hoot" commercial. And also The Lorax which while quite monodimensional does leave some hope at the end, and in the hands of an ordinary person.

[nefaria]

I loved "The Lorax", it was one of my favorite short cartoons as a kid. Dr. Seuss portrayed environmentalism as pro-human instead of anti-human like the recent developments. These days, environmentalism is all about punishing people and taking away their options.

[jcw_da_dmg]

Presto was pretty cool.

[cathyr19355]

Now I saw the message not so much as "give a hoot" but as "don't make excuses, get up and take action." That's a message I can get behind, never mind the dubiousness of the depicted ecological disaster.