“Pixar Genius”

The most recent New York Review of Books has this article by Christian Caryl about the genius of Pixar. For those who don’t have a subscription, Caryl provides an insightful analysis of Wall-E excerpted below:

There are underdogs and then there are underdogs. It is eight hundred years in the future. Earth is a toxic, dusty junkyard, awash in Himalayas of refuse, and the only one left to do the job of cleaning it all up is a waist-high, trash-compacting robot who goes by the name of WALL·E (for ‘Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class’). The humans who made such a mess out of their planet have long since absconded to starships where they have spent the intervening centuries being waited on hand and foot by other robots. The combination of low gravity and nonstop pampering has transformed the passengers on this ‘luxury cruise’ into bloated parodies of themselves, baby-like fatties who are so lazy that they’ve lost any sense of what being human is all about. In his solitude, ironically, WALL·E has been evolving in the opposite direction. Over the years he has become sentient.

It’s a funny thing about sentience, though. One side effect of self-awareness is that you become aware of the absence of others, and even as he keeps making the rounds this workhorse robot longs for a sense of connection. Since there aren’t any other intelligent beings around, WALL-E, like so many present-day humans, seeks solace in the movies. He’s become an impassioned collector of odd human artifacts, and on of his most treasured finds turns out to be, of all things, a battered videocassette of the twentieth-century musical Hello, Dolly!

This immersion in 1960s camp primes him for his encounter with EVE, aka “Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator,” a robot probe that has been automatically dispatched to Earth to check for signs that life has returned. WALL-E and EVE are the perfect Hollywood couple. She’s a smooth white egg with mysterious powers and weightless grace; he’s a clod-hopper, a Chaplinesque klutz whose good-natured persistence and purity of intention somehow enable him to triumphy. At first EVE is all business; their meet-cute, which is punctuated by a mushroom cloud, will be a hard one for future screenwriters to beat. But WALL-E’s wooing — and the courage with which he follows her back to the mother ship to help her fulfill her mission — end up persuading her that intelligence isn’t just about following your prime directive. it turns out that it’s hard to be a thinking being without also picking up emotion, awareness, the sense of possibility — and the desire for companionship.

WALL-E is one of those stories where the Protagonist doesn’t undergo a transformation, rather the Protagonist transforms others. And as the plot evolves into something with intergalactic ramifications, wherein Wall-E and Eve create a chain of events that eventually convinces humans to get off their lard-asses and return to Earth, at the heart of the story is the Protagonist — Attractor relationship between two robots:

He [Wall-E] just wants to capture the heart of his beloved (and, as inspired by Hello, Dolly!, to hold her hand a bit). Andrew Stanton, the movie’s director and cowriters, has said that WALL-E’s personal mission, and the driving conceit of the film, can be neatly summed up in one of Jerry Herman’s lyrics from the little robot’s favorite musical: “We can’t go home/ until we’ve kissed the girl.” WALL-E doesn’t mean to overturn the status quo on board the starship (which bears the subtly appropriate name the Axiom). He doesn’t mean to liberate the other robots from their drudgery or to give the humans an object lesson in what being human is all about. But he does. By his example, WALL-E, the artificial life form, ends up reminding them all why life is worth living — and thus inspires them to return to Earth. And it’s precisely the mismatch between his modest aspirations and the events he sets in motion that drives the story’s wistful sense of comedy.

We did a lot of analysis on Wall-E here last year including this interview with Stanton as well as a comparison of writing styles for the screenplay for Wall-E and the various scripts for the movie Alien.

For more on Pixar, the New York Review of Books article notes three titles:

“The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company”, by David A. Price

“To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios”, by Karen Paik, based on research and interviews by Leslie Iwerks, with a foreword by John Lasseter

“The Art of Pixar Short Films”, by Amid Amidi, with a foreword by John Lasseter

UPDATE: This is great. A spoof on Pixar’s ‘next’ movie project:

BTW, the folks at Pixar are so cool, they provide a link to the spoof — clearly able to make fun of themselves. But I guess if you’ve been responsible for producing movies that have grossed a zillion dollars, you can laugh at yourself — all the way to the 3D animated bank!