Wall E: Use of the Musical Film and Mise en Scene

Southern Communication Journal, 2018

Critiques of the Internet age often place technological change in contest with social virtues. This essay analyzes the 2008 Pixar film WALL•E to better understand how the interplay of these positions is presented in popular form. I argue the film reconciles this tension by framing virtues as both integral to living well with technology, and as a necessary ability of human beings. I refer to this framing as automatic agency. An agentic reading of WALL•E offers two points of interest for rhetorical critics. It highlights the drawbacks to narratives that rely on the agent-act ratio as public pedagogy, and draws attention to the tendency of framing virtues through the lens of mechanized technology rather than techne.

Live-action film and video games share a presence and convergence in each media's visuality and narrative storytelling; this is especially apparent over the last four decades – from Tron (1982) to Run Lola Run (1998) to The Beach (2000) and now 'machinima' as new computational genre cinema via Minecraft (2014). To complicate matters, only recently are cinema and video games now tropes in 3-D computer animation, with films such as Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) and Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012) absorbing these cultural relations. In this article, the authors explicate on two interwoven yet separable themes in the Walt Disney/Pixar films. First, they theorize aspects of the 'imperfect aesthetic' as connected to an audience and industry's desire to aesthetically 'deskill' – as explained in John Roberts's article 'Art after deskilling' (2010) – the image of its characters, in the process making the characters more vulnerable and thus more endearing. This imperfect aesthetic is typically associated with avant-garde animation or animated shorts, yet to link imperfection to 3-D computer animation illustrates a new visual tendency since the 2000s. Second, they draw on the scholarship of Maurizio Lazzarato to relate immaterial labor to what each character does in their animated worlds, what they call 'digital labor zones': the Wall-E robot is prone to affective labor while in Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph, the goofy villain, begins to question the reasons for his rampaging behavior and the labor behind such actions.

This study examined portrayals of masculinities in Pixar's first 13 feature-length films.

This article analyses the field of Sound Design, within the context of film. It raises questions as to the importance of a deliberate design of sound, throughout a film, and suggests that a films sound is still too often undeserved. After presenting a brief history of Sound Design, this literature considers ‘Sound Design’, the growth of the concept, in films, since its inception in the late 1970s. It will focus on ideas proposed by academics, and critics, found in books, online journals, newspaper articles, podcasts and other online resources with regards to its believed effect in eliciting an emotional response in audiences. Examining feature length movies; The Conversation (1974) & Wall-E (2008), I analyse the key themes raised in the literature review, and in context with these, present examples that aim to legitimise one theory or another. Moreover it includes scientific research, Emoacoustics which offers another avenue in the aim of answering my research question. I also evaluate on my own production, “Simon” which aimed to further test proposed theories within my research.

Pixar's 2008 film WALL-E is set in a post-apocalyptic twenty-ninth century, in which humanity has left an uninhabitable Earth because its waste and garbage production led to global environmental destruction. Robots were left behind in order to clean Earth until its environment would suit human life again, but the ordeal of the centuries-long project diminished their ranks until one last robot is left functioning on the planet. The film opens by chronicling the daily routine of collecting and compressing junk into small cubes by this last Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth robot. WALL-E , however, is shown taking a lunch-box to work, listening to music at work, hanging up his dirty chains when coming home, and turning on the TV after a long day of labor, and appears to be more than a mere mechanical entity. WALL-E hums and giggles, befriends a cockroach and is ticklish, rocks himself to sleep and is drowsy in the morning. WALL-E longs for love and can be scared -the machine has developed beyond its initial programmed function of garbage compression and waste allocation. Later, the robot even introduces himself as "WALL-E," signalling the development of an identity over the course of his 700 years of labour compressing and stacking junk. As Vivian Sobchack maintains in her essay 'Animation and Automation, or, the Incredible Effortfulness of Being,' identity formation is linked to the category of movement and work, in that "movement and work are figured as self-generating, producing (or reproducing) curiosity, adaptability, emotion, desire and (dare I say) 'intersubjectivity'" (Sobchack 2009, p.388).

The Nigerian film industry (Nollywood) embraces both motion picture and television approaches; yet it cannot be called one or the other in its entirety. This ‘both and neither’ nature has forced scholars such as Kenneth Harrow to ask: ‘how are we to read their films?’ and, by virtue of this article, their film music. I argue that the capacity to do so subsists in a thorough understanding of the industry’s organisation and long-held divergent creative process. My ethnographic study reveals that Nollywood’s structure of film music production differs significantly from some other known cinema traditions of the world. One such striking observation is that Nollywood film music projects and production (recording, editing, spotting, etc.) are entirely carried out without the involvement of film directors. And this unique process and structure strongly influences its film music approaches and aesthetics. This paper, thus, presents and examines those differences with a view to offering insights on how Nollywood film music might be understood.

2010

"This thesis is the first in-depth, historical study of Hollywood’s relationship with the ‘family audience’ and ‘family film’. Since the 1970s, Hollywood family films have been the most lucrative screen entertainments in the world, and despite their relativelyunexplored status in academic film criticism and history, I will argue that the format is centrally important in understanding mainstream Hollywood cinema. How have ‘family films’ become so globally dominant? One answer is that Hollywood’s international power facilitates the global proliferation of its products, but this explanation, in isolation, is insufficient. I will argue that Hollywood family films are designed to transcend normative barriers of age, gender, race, culture and even taste; they target the widest possible audiences to maximise commercial returns, trying to please as many people, and offend as few, as possible. This they achieve through a combination of ideological populism, emotional stimulation, impressive spectacle, and the calculated minimisation of potentially objectionable elements, such as sex, violence, and excessive socio-cultural specificity. Initially, the audience for family films was predominantly domestic, but with the increasing spending power of international audiences, family films are now formulated on the belief that no market is inaccessible. For this reason, they are inextricably linked with Hollywood – the only film industry in the world with the resources and distribution capacity to address a truly global mass audience. The ‘family film’ originated in early-1930s Hollywood as a mixture of propaganda and commercial idealism. Hollywood cinema was already an international cultural phenomenon, but was founded upon a claim to universality that was undermined by the predominance of adult-orientated films. The family film was the result both of external pressures to make films more morally-suitable for children, and the desire to engage a more middle-class mass audience. Films targeting the so-called ‘family audience’ were excellent propaganda for Hollywood, suggesting superior production, inoffensiveness and broad appeal. Although such movies have not always commanded the mass (‘family’) audiences for which they are intended, they have flourished in the domestic and international media marketplace since the 1970s, and their commercial and cultural dominance appears likely to extend further in the years to come. Whilst the idea of a universally-appealing film remains an impossible dream, mainstream Hollywood has pursued it relentlessly. It is the Holy Grail for mainstream producers, and has attained considerable importance in U.S. – and increasingly international – culture, as audiences flock to see films which appear to transcend run-of-the-mill screen entertainment by providing universally-intelligible aesthetic and/or emotional satisfaction. This thesis maps the history of the Hollywood family film, documenting the motivations and strategies involved in its emergence and development, analysing the form creatively and ideologically, evaluating its place within global mass entertainment, and underlining its considerable importance."

This article argues that Pixar's computer generated (CG) animated features of the past 15 years sit at a crossroads in both the conceptualization of viewers and their socialization to the contemporary digital screen. Embedded within a new aesthetic visual form, almost all of Pixar's movies feature, and talk back to, the emergence of the mythical astonished cinema spectator. At the same time, Pixar's features question the future of digital spectacle and the position of the screen subject. In the contemporary context of the social network and the online video, CG animated features do not simply prepare young viewers for a world of consumer behaviour, they prepare them for a multilayered world of digital screens in which they must learn to function as objects of consumption as well as consuming agents. Beyond this, however, and in contrast to previous Disney features, Pixar movies prepare young consumers for a changed production landscape in contemporary culture. Moving beyond notions of Fordist production that structured previous discourses of the viewing and socialized child, the spectacular specificity of Pixar movies is now structured self-reflexively according to the logic of the attention economy.

Journal of Film and Video. vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 43-56, 2014

Although sometimes tongue-in-cheek, I examine Pixar’s construction of little girls within the context of a brand image of Pixar’s animator-directors as “boys at heart”--that is, as Peter Pan types who have never really grown up. I explore whether Pixar’s films reflect a certain apprehension about little girls that can, perhaps, be likened to the way young boys often display a notable ambivalence toward girls. Pixar’s little girls are not always so “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but rather embody toxicity to varying degrees (though not always seriously), becoming a source of fear, pain, or humiliation to a number of male characters in several Pixar films.