Just Don’t Say the ‘E’ Word

The marketing for Pixar’s Wall-E has been superb thus far. They’ve managed to control who saw the film first (which always devolves into a pissing contest) and I have been wondering for a while now about why they were doing this – why was it not being seen by everyone and what were they hiding? Well, Devin Feraci at CHUD may be onto something when he writes:

The new Pixar film Wall-E presents a wonderful message about environmental stewardship and about conservation. It graphically shows us both the fragility and strength of the ecosystem, the dangers and hopes facing us as a species impacting the Earth with our pollutants and our junk. It also contains unsubtle jabs at corporate megapowers, out of control branding, insidious advertising and rampant consumerism.

But apparently that’s all there by happenstance – at least according to writer/director Andrew Stanton. “The most I do is recycle, and sometimes I’m even pretty bad at that,” Stanton said at the Wall-E press junket when asked about the ecological and political themes of the film. And he wanted to make sure that the assembled journalists didn’t think he was smuggling a subversive message into his kid’s movie. “I don’t have a political bent, I don’t have an ecological message to push.”

That’s sort of a weird statement to hear after seeing the film. Creativity is a mysterious thing, and themes and meanings can become embedded in a work in such a way that even the creator isn’t aware they’re there, but the environmental and political themes of this movie are well beyond subtext and are so blatant that you’d expect to see the Wall-E character being used in conservation ads and for the life-size animatronic Wall-E built to promote the film to show up at environmentally-themed events. Instead Stanton and Pixar are all but disavowing these obvious, in-your-face messages and pushing Wall-E as a simple robot love story.

So far the film has been nothing but positive buzz. It’s hard to imagine that Pixar would seriously want to “hide” the film’s message. Then again, it’s a Drudge headline waiting to happen and there are vast numbers of Americans who might just tune it out if they think it’s a message movie. But, as Feraci points out, its message is on the hypocritical side – selling a lot of stuff to create the very thing the film deplores. On the other hand, the marketing is, well, the marketing. What can be done about it when there are contracts signed and truckloads of cash to be made? If Pixar says its standing by “the message” it will have a lot of splainin’ to do, like where the toys are made, what materials, how green was the production itself, whether a portion of the sales are being donating to environmental causes. Isn’t it just better all the way around not to go there?¬† Wall-E opens on Thursday.

As far as Oscar goes, Pixar’s Cars was beaten by the gladly exposed environmental movie, Happy Feet. That was a film with a message which made money. But did it make SERIOUS money? Did it hock junk? Happy Feet’s director, George Miller said that the original script didn’t have an environmental message but “In Australia, we’re very, very aware of the ozone hole,” he said, “and Antarctica is literally the canary in the coal mine for this stuff. So it sort of had to go in that direction.” He went on to say, “You can’t tell a story about Antarctica and the penguins without giving that dimension.”