With its polarizing new feature “WALL•E,” Pixar Animation has drawn a degree of ire from conservative critics that’s usually reserved for documentaries by Michael Moore or Al Gore.
This, from the same universally celebrated team of animators who’ve given us beloved tales of talking toys, cars, bugs and clownfish?
“WALL•E,” for those without young children or certifiably geeky moviegoing habits, is an astonishingly bleak science-fantasy set 700 years into the future. So clogged is Earth with trash that humankind has split from the planet on a gigantic spaceship, owned by a gigantic corporation called Buy ’n’ Large.
Life on the space liner is a mash-up of the worst nightmares of Aldous Huxley and Richard Simmons: Everyone is fat, immobile and transported on what look like floating dentist chairs.
They’re provided nutrition through some kind of Big Gulp-y concoction and are practically stoned on multimedia entertainment and advertisements. In the movie’s desensitized dystopia, people have literally lost touch with one another and themselves, communicating only through 2700-vintage personal digital assistants.
Back on the forsaken third rock, WALL•E, the adorable title robot with owlish eyes, gobbles up trash and stacks it in tidy cubes. He apparently hasn’t noticed that he’s the only robot left performing a hopeless task in a lifeless place.
Human beings, in “WALL•E’s” world, have made a monumental mess of things. This is the kind of message-y satire that makes conservatives gag.
To take one example of right-of-center reactions over the last couple of weeks, a blogger at Red State Network wrote: “Unless you want to pay good money to have your kids propagandized into a Marxist, Eco-Theological worldview, stay far, far away from this one.”
That was just before the writer compared Pixar to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Less hysterically, Greg Pollowitz, writing on National Review Online’s global warming blog Planet Gore, likened the movie to a “90-minute lecture on the dangers of overconsumption, big corporations and the destruction of the environment.”
Yet, I think these conservatives listened to “WALL•E” with the wrong set of ears.
Since it premiered its first feature, 1995’s “Toy Story,” Pixar has been a bastion of a certain species of conservatism. It’s not partisan or even political. It is, as adherents like to say, less an ideology than a temperament: a way of looking at social outcomes through the lens of history and with a keen sense of limits - and, critically, with the realization that the present and the future may not be better than the past.
It’s a safe bet that none of Pixar’s writing talent is conversant in the collected works of Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke. (“WALL•E” was directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, who was primarily responsible for Pixar’s biggest box-office hit, 2003’s “Finding Nemo.”) Yet you can hear echoes of traditionalism ringing throughout Pixar’s movies.
Mr. Stanton said he was inspired to write “Finding Nemo” - a story about an overprotective father clownfish who searches for a lost son - after realizing he’d been spending too much time away from his children.
Pixar prefers what’s old to what’s new. There is, to begin with, the kickoff to the “Toy Story” plot: Who didn’t feel a twinge when Woody, a toy cowboy, is temporarily discarded after the arrival of a fancy new action-figure named Buzz Lightyear?
“Cars” (2006), suffused with nostalgia for the old Route 66, hard-pedaled the theme of negative progress. Radiator Springs, a small Southwestern town, we learn, had been a bustling place before a new interstate highway erased it from the map.
There is no evil corporate villain here - just the normal, but invisibly costly, human preference for expedience and efficiency. “Main Street isn’t Main Street anymore/No one seems to need us like they did before,” goes a Randy Newman-penned gem of a ballad on the “Cars” soundtrack.
Pixar doesn’t pine for rock critic Greil Marcus’ “old, weird America”; it pines for old, mainstream America.
“WALL•E,” meanwhile, has taken quite a bit of flack for its satirical portrait of a “global CEO” by the comic actor Fred Willard, who does, it’s true, appear to be doing a sub-George W. shtick.
However, imagine if, instead of a “global CEO,” the writers had chosen a United Nations, one-world-government type of figure? Conservatives would have choked on their popcorn in delighted shock - much as they did at last year’s “Ratatouille,” with its implication that excellence is often inborn.
That outsize institutions - whether overweening nanny states like that of Pixar’s brilliant 2004 feature “The Incredibles” or a multinational corporation - are no good for individual freedom is a cardinal belief of modern conservatism’s small-is-beautiful entrepreneurial wing - positively Gilderian.
Neither is it unconservative to worry about the numbing effects of accumulating too much stuff and automating every imaginable mundane task and movement - which is “WALL•E’s” main beef with 21st-century modernity.
The movie has next to nothing to say about global warming or the delicate balance of Earth’s ecosystem: Intercontinentally speaking, “WALL•E”-worlders had simply run out of closet space.
While my 4-year-old son was bored stiff after 30 minutes of the movie, I’m still tempted to buy him a “WALL•E” toy. Perhaps, after all of our children tire of “WALL•E” merchandise, we can dump it on the front lawn of Pixar’s studio in Emeryville, Calif.
To paraphrase the sociologist Daniel Bell, we could call it an exercise in the cultural contradictions of Pixarian conservatism.
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