Jon said to look at Disney films and see if any had the same themes as The Declaration Books. I look on Google and found this article. Jon also said that I could look into making puppets. I like this idea so will make puppets for the project.
Wall-E is an eco-dystopian gem — an anti-consumption movie (from Disney!)
Disney/Pixar’s new hit Wall-E is easily one of the best movie dystopias ever. It ranks with Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Mad MaxBeyond Thunderdome, the Matrix, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and the first two Terminator movies.
Yes, Hollywood loves dystopias. Perhaps because it is one (okay, technically it is ananti-utopia).
One is that we can expect to see more environmental dystopias as the painful reality of global warming becomes more and more obvious to all. Wall-E makes clear that even the most brutal satire of our self-inflicted environmental predicament can be a box office success, if it is well done. The second reason is the incredible irony of Disney making this movie.
As a film it is superb, a must see for children and adults. Critically acclaimed, it received a rare 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. The New Yorker‘s tough-to-please David Denby writes:
This may be the only major movie ever made that is both a dystopia and anti-utopia. In the dystopic first half, we see a lifeless post-eco-apocalyptic Earth overrun by toxic garbage, which is collected and compacted by our robotic hero, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class). WALL-E has become sentient by collecting and studying the waste of humanity, including an old tape of the movie Hello Dolly he plays over and over again.
In the anti-utopic second half, the megacorporation Buy ‘N Large had created a seeming paradise for humans on board “Executive Starliners” where every task has become automated. But hundreds of years after what was supposed to be a brief exodus while Earth was cleaned up, humans have become “a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk.” These lazy, overweight video-addicts — whoever could the moviemakers be talking about? — are less human than WALL-E.
Though criticized by some conservatives as anti-capitalist, WALL-E is perhaps best described as one of the most anti-consumption movies ever made. That’s why even Michael Gerson, a Former Bush speechwriter known for his evangelical moralism, loved the movie and saw it as a daring attack on “a culture of consumption.”
As much as I loved the movie, I did find an odd disjunction….
Yes, the movie is a brutal satire on “self-involved consumption.” But if we are looking at who in the world is responsible for self-involved consumption, for the global homogenization of mass consumerism, for instigating the shop-until-you-drop culture at an early age, surely Disney itself would be on the short list.
Indeed, you can go to Amazon.com and find lots of mass consumer junk delightfulWall-E toys. For a mere $63.99 plus shipping and handling, you can indoctrinate buy your prospective mass consumer precocious child a U Command Wall-E (featured above), which is the 28th most popular Toy on amazon.
[I am happy to say my child (so far) only owns one of the top 50 most popular Toys & Games -- LeapFrog® Learn & Groove® Musical Table, which is not at all junk and in fact quite educational and hopefully we will hand it down to someone else's child blah, blah, blah.]
Our culture is going to undergo a remarkable transformation over the next few decades. Either we will proactively embrace an efficiency, conservation, and clean energy revolution starting in the first term of the next president. Or a culture of scarcity will be forced upon us sometime during Planetary Purgatory (see “Anti-science conservatives must be stopped“). I am not so rosy-eyed as to see the former as a utopia, but the latter will most certainly be a dystopia grim as any ever envisioned.
In a distant, but not so unrealistic future, where mankind has abandoned earth because it has become covered with trash from products sold by the powerful multi-national Buy N Large corporation, WALL-E, a garbage collecting robot has been left to clean up the mess. Mesmerized with trinkets of Earth's history and show tunes, WALL-E is alone on Earth except for a sprightly pet cockroach. One day, EVE, a sleek (and dangerous) reconnaissance robot, is sent to Earth to find proof that life is once again sustainable. WALL-E falls in love with EVE. WALL-E rescues EVE from a dust storm and shows her a living plant he found amongst the rubble. Consistent with her "directive" EVE takes the plant and automatically enters a deactivated state except for a blinking green beacon. WALL-E, doesn't understand what has happened to his new friend, but true to his love, he protects her from wind, rain, and lightning, even as she is unresponsive. One day a massive ship comes to reclaim EVE, but WALL-E, out of love or loneliness hitches a ride on the outside of the ship to rescue EVE. The ship arrives back at a large space cruise ship, which is carrying all of the humans who evacuated Earth 700 years earlier. The people of Earth ride around this space resort on hovering chairs which give them a constant feed of TV and video chatting. They drink all of their meals through a straw out of laziness and/or bone loss, and are all so fat that they can barely move. When the auto-pilot computer, acting on hastily given instructions sent many centuries before, tries to prevent the people of Earth from returning, by stealing the plant, WALL-E, EVE, the portly captain, and a band of broken robots stage a mutiny.
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I have watched Wall-e in the past and I don't think it would be a good film to make into a puppet show, so I'm going to ask Jon tomorrow what he suggests.
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