{"id":231,"date":"2008-07-02T16:43:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-02T16:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2008\/07\/02\/wall-e-avoiding-the-lorax"},"modified":"2026-07-01T13:25:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T19:25:41","slug":"wall-e-avoiding-the-lorax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wall-e-avoiding-the-lorax\/","title":{"rendered":"Wall-E: Avoiding the Lorax"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I went and saw Wall-E<\/span> yesterday with the kids, and the proof that Pixar has made another winner was that the flick held Stalliondo\u2019s undivided attention for almost the entire movie. (He got fidgety near the end.) I ended up liking the film a whole lot more than I thought I would, probably because I was bracing myself for a high-tech version of The Lorax,<\/span> a story that makes me retch just thinking about it.<\/p>\n

Who could forget the colorful piece of bile that is The Lorax<\/span>? It\u2019s Dr. Seuss\u2019 environmental screed about a fluffy busybody that wants to shut down the Thneed industry. Thneeds, which everyone needs, are made out of Truffula trees, and the Lorax speaks for the Truffula trees, doncha know, but the Onceler is chopping all of them down and choking the rivers and leaving a desolate wasteland, forcing the Lorax to lift himself by his buttocks into the sky, leaving behind a platform that says, pretentiously, \u201cUnless\u2026\u201d
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s preachy, didactic crap that makes no sense. I mean, come on! Ol\u2019 Onceler would be replanting Truffulas all along the way so as to keep the Thneed industry in business and make sure his product line never stopped moving. People fail to understand that those who make their living off the land have a vested interest in ensuring that the land remains profitable \u2013 which means keeping it in good, fertile condition. The government and the tree huggers want us to abandon the land to its own devices, but the results aren\u2019t great. Believe me, I\u2019ve tried that technique in my own backyard, and it doesn\u2019t work well.<\/p>\n

(As a tangent, I should note that My Esteemed Colleague once protested the removal of a grass island in the middle of his street by sitting in front of a bulldozer and reading The Lorax<\/span>. Now that would have been a sight to see.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, The Lorax<\/span> is, I think, the gold standard for maudlin environmental claptrap, and by expecting a similar dose of green guilt, I was relieved to discover that wasn\u2019t really what Wall-E<\/span> was trying to do. It\u2019s there if you look for it, though, especially in the idea that it\u2019s unfettered capitalism that will do us in. The world has been co-opted by a massive corporation called \u201cBuyNLarge,\u201d run by a president played, in live action, by the brilliant Fred Willard, and the corporation also runs the government, too.<\/p>\n

As if the problem we face is that capitalism is running wild! We\u2019re hobbling capitalism every chance we get, all around the globe.<\/p>\n

And capitalism is far better for the environment than Obama-style centralized command-and-control government. Anyone remember Eastern Europe in the Iron Curtain days? The egalitarian communists were far greater polluters than we decadent Westerners. So it\u2019s silly to fear a metastasized Wal-Mart taking over the world.<\/p>\n

There. Moaning over. Because Wall-E<\/span> uses that as a backdrop to tell a very simple story about one lonely soul who finds true love. And that\u2019s really what interests the screenwriters, so it doesn\u2019t really matter what the backstory is. The character of Wall-E<\/span> is remarkably expressive, and the movie is at its most powerful in the first act, when he and his lady love, Eve, are essentially the only \u201cliving\u201d souls onscreen. Can a movie with only two characters and no real dialogue really hold the attention of a three-year-old? Yes. That\u2019s a colossal accomplishment.<\/p>\n

The movie falters somewhat as we leave what remains of Earth and rejoin the human race in outer space \u2013 I\u2019ll wander into mild spoiler territory from here on out, so skip to the end if you want to avoid any and all plot info \u2013 because suddenly it\u2019s not just about Wall-E and Eve, it\u2019s about the fate of humanity. I found that distracting. I didn\u2019t really care if humankind found its way again \u2013 I just wanted to know what was going on with Wall-E and Eve. In this sense, the movie almost fell prey to what I call The American President<\/span> Syndrome, which I will explain quickly.<\/p>\n

<\/a>You remember The American President<\/span>, don\u2019t you? It was a movie where Michael Douglas was a widower version of Bill Clinton who falls for a lovely lobbyist in the form of Annette Bening. The whole thing was billed as a romance, but it\u2019s a bait-and-switch. Because to win his lady love, he has to appear before the press corps and give a ten-minute speech featuring highlights from Michael Dukakis\u2019 Greatest Hits, including praise of the ACLU, a defense of flag burning, gun control, and, of course, reducing carbon emissions. You realize by then, if you didn\u2019t before, that this was the filmmaker\u2019s agenda all along. Oh, sure, they\u2019ll throw in a sappy romance because that will get you into the theater, but it\u2019s just a spoonful of sugar to make the bitter leftist medicine go down.<\/p>\n

(It\u2019s interesting to note that Aaron Sorkin, writer of The American President<\/span>, brought the same concept to TV with The West Wing<\/span>, promoting movie Chief of Staff Martin Sheen to TV President and abandoning the romance in favor of dramatized DNC talking points. Is there really any question as to what story he wants to tell?)<\/p>\n

Wall-E<\/span> almost goes down that road as humanity is forced to come to terms with its failures, but, thankfully, it never fully succumbs. Even amid the commentary, there\u2019s a beautiful extended sequence in outer space featuring two robots, a fire extinguisher, and static electricity that\u2019s as magnificent a silent love scene as has ever been put to film. And even after the fate of humanity has been settled, there\u2019s a final scene between Eve and Wall-E that resolves the story that matters, the story that never gets fully subordinated to Lorax-style greenhouse gaseousness.<\/p>\n

Yes, Wall-E h<\/span>as some dumb ideas, but its heart is always in the right place. It\u2019s Pixar\u2019s second-best film \u2013 after The Incredibles<\/span>, of course. Needless to say, it\u2019s a movie worth watching.<\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

I\u2019m done reviewing the movie. I\u2019m now going to talk about something tangential, something in which my wife had absolutely no interest when I tried discussing it with her last night.<\/p>\n

I want to say how cool it was to have them use those excerpts from Hello, Dolly<\/span> throughout the film. That\u2019s Michael Crawford, he of Phantom of the Opera<\/span> fame, trying unsuccessfully to mask his English accent and sing \u201cPut On Your Sunday Clothes,\u201d a delightfully sappy old tune that I once sang as a solo for the Kids of the Century long, long ago. I know all the words and was singing along \u2013 it\u2019s hard to sing the line about \u201cA lovely lilt that makes you tilt your nose,\u201d though, because the L’s get all cluttered together.<\/p>\n

Lest you get any mistaken ideas about renting the whole Hello, Dolly<\/span> movie, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. The movie version stinks. They ditched Carol Channing \u2013 the quintessential Dolly Levi who, if she\u2019s not dead, is probably still touring with the show \u2013 in favor of \u2013 *shudder* – Barbra Streisand, who sucks. I saw Carol Channing play Dolly live back in the early Eighties, and she was magnificent. Babs blows.<\/p>\n

The end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"I went and saw Wall-E<\/span> yesterday with the kids, and the proof that Pixar has made another winner was that the flick held Stalliondo\u2019s undivided attention for almost the entire movie. (He got fidgety near the end.) I ended up liking the film a whole lot more than I thought I would, probably because I ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5228,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/5228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}