Pixar has built its reputation on making films for families. From the original Toy Story to last summer’s Ratatouille, these films make a point of not only raising the bar for quality in CGI (computer-generated imagery) movies, but also maintaining a storytelling ability that proves to be enjoyable for both children and adults, time and time again. This summer’s hit, WALL-E, proves to be no exception.
The story revolves around WALL-E, a plucky little robot whose sole purpose is to clean up the garbage on a ruined, deserted Earth long abandoned by the people who once lived there. WALL-E’s life is one of routine; he gets up in the morning, charges his solar-powered battery, and goes to work for the day — picking up garbage and crushing it into cubes, which he stacks up until they’re high as sky scrapers. Along the way, he keeps any interesting junk he finds, zippo lighters, forks, knives, spare parts for himself, and interacts with the only living thing around, a cockroach. Life is simple for WALL-E, but it’s apparent that he’s gotten lonely. He learns about emotion and love through watching a recording of “Hello Dolly” that he found amongst all the junk. Everything changes one day though, when another robot, a lady robot, lands on the planet and starts poking around.
This new robot is named EVE, and her purpose is to search for and collect vegetation to bring back to the Axiom, the luxury space liner where Earth’s former residents now live, far from Earth. Sleek, ergonomically designed, and capable of flying fast enough to break the sound barrier, EVE is like nothing WALL-E has ever seen before, and he soon develops a hopeless infatuation with her, which, despite her devotion to her programming directive, she begins to return. Everything is going well; WALL-E shows EVE all of the stuff that he’s collected — a rubix cube, a sheet of bubble wrap, a zippo lighter — until he shows her a plant, the first sign of natural life on this dead planet, which he found while he was collecting garbage one day. As soon as EVE sees the plant, her programing kicks into action, and she snatches the plant out of WALL-E’s hands, conceals it inside her, and deactivates. Soon WALL-E and EVE find themselves aboard the Axiom, as EVE’s transport ship picks her up and brings her back there, with WALL-E doing everything he can to keep up, and make sure that she and her precious cargo are safe.
Because that’s what this movie is about: WALL-E is the protector of EVE and the life she carries inside of her. It’s one of the most beautiful — and perhaps unexpected — metaphors for life, and the role of a husband to protect his wife and family, that I’ve ever seen.
Contrast that with several others movies that have come out recently: No Country For Old Men and The Dark Knight. The main antagonists in the movies, Anton Chigurh and the Joker, respectfully, both represent unstoppable evil, an evil that feeds on itself, and whose thirst for the destruction of society is never satiated. Furthermore, as Jon pointed out, the stories told in these movies leave an ambiguous answer as to whether or not society can win out against this evil. Going in a slightly different direction, the movie There Will Be Blood also tells a dark story of an entrepreneur who is consumed by his desire for money and power in early 1900s America. By the end of the movie, Daniel Plainview owns oil drilling, but it has come at the expense of his own capability to love or care about anyone else, even his own son, whom he cruelly disowns when his son reveals his intention to go into business for himself.
All three of these movies potray people who, through their actions, seek to destroy the world, whether that’s their intention or not. They are important movies, and the statements they make are, at this point, very relevant and worth thinking about, but there needs to be a balance to these statements, there needs to be a solution offered to the problems they highlight. This is why, despite the awesome impact you are left with after The Dark Knight, you will probably come away with some feeling of hopelessness as well.
In a different, but related vein, the direction in which Nintendo has been taking its Wii console, and subsequently the market it is pursuing, differs greatly from that of the other two major video game console manufacturers, Sony and Microsoft. From the start, the Wii has been about multi-player gaming; Nintendo has made games that are easy for almost anyone to pick up and get into right away, and has also done well in making their games accessable to people of every age group and demographic. Many of their games take advantage of the Wii’s distinctive motion-sensing control scheme, which can include swinging the controller like a golf club, aiming it like a gun, or shaking it like a bottle of soda pop. These motion controls tend to make the gameplay experience fun and unique, and have reminded many people of just how enjoyable two-player gaming can be. In doing this, they’ve gone a long way to offer an alternative to the average video game experience.
Nintendo has also encouraged mental fitness with the introduction of Brain Age, a daily brain training game for the Nintendo DS handheld system. The game consists of several daily tests that seek to help you improve the age at which your brain performs, or your “brain age”, with higher ages being not so good, and 20 being optimal. In addition to that, Nintendo has also introduced Wii Fit, an exercise-oriented game which introduces a new “balance board” peripheral that the user stands on and moves this way or that while the board senses which way they are balancing. Innovations like this do much to demonstrate Nintendo’s distinctive style and approach to the video game market.
In their own ways, Pixar and Nintendo are seeking to improve the world by utilizing the formulas that they have used to build their reputations. The one of a kind approach that they take to their respective industries demonstrates that there are still innovators working to save us from ourselves, and while I realize that they are both companies doing what they can to make money, it’s good to see that in an age and in an industry where the standard is to continually leverage profit by making things BIGGER and BETTER, there are still some companies who take pride in their work, and refuse to lower the standards they have set for themselves.
