Jessi Starr

March 27, 2011

COM 3000-EO
Midterm Paper

Pixar’s Wall-E: Much More Than a Cute Animation –

Sends America a Message

Pixar films are famous for their abilities to produce absolutely, completely,
speechless extraordinary computer-animated fiction stories. One of their most recent and
rewarding films is Wall-E. As soon as the previews were released, the movie looked like
the cutest, sweet, childish animated movie of all times. However, Pixar had more in mind
that just creating an adorable movie about little animated robots not speaking a single
human word in the first 20 minutes. Wall-E to many viewers of society was indeed one of
the cutest movies Pixar has released, but it was the deeply powerful underlying messages
in the film that made the film standout the viewers across the country. Pixar had
something more in mind when they produced the movie Wall-E in 2008. The film is
much more than just an adorable animated love story between robots. Through the
carnivalesque mockery of our societal norms in today’s society and the binary opposition
of human-versus-technology, Wall-E portrays a very determined, powerful message to
it’s viewers.
Wall-E is a computer-animated tale of Disney and Pixar produced by Andrew
Stanton in 2008. It is the tale set in a distant future of 700 years later in which our Earth
has been completely abandoned because it has become a massive landfill covered with
the trash of the products from the nation’s top most powerful Buy N Large Corporation.
The planet has been evacuated, the entire population into space on a shiny, top of the line
automated fully-equip spaceship, the Axiom, of the megacorporation Buy N Large,
(BnL). BnL left behind an army amount of little tiny compactor robots called Wall-E,
Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth, taking out the trash, compacting it all into cubes
placed side-by-side as sense of a ‘clean-up’ process.
However, as the movie begins, their ever-so-hopeful clean-up plan reveals to be
failing due to extreme levels of toxic that do not make life sustainable on earth which
forces society to remain in space and leaving only one single Wall-E unit actively still
proceeded with it’s cleaning duties. While working away and collecting miscellaneous
keepsakes he finds, Wall-E comes across a seed growing among the trash compound and
brings it home to keep at his home inside of an old truck. It was when BnL sent down a
spaceship with an advanced robot detective to search for signs of any life on Earth, that
Wall-E comes eye-to-eye with the magnificent modern tech-savvy robot, Eve.
Wall-E, being alone for quite sometime, befriends Eve in fascination and brings
her to show-off his home he is so proud of. Wall-E shows Eve the plant that he has found,
which symbolizes real life; Eve quickly reverts into her standby, shut down mode and
sends the retrieval signal to the Axiom. Since signs of living life is was the mission Eve
was sent on, the Axiom automatically sends Eve’s ship back to collect her and the
evidence she has found. Being alone and stranded by himself for hundreds of years, Wall-
E clings to side of the ship, refusing to lose the connection he has found with Eve and
cannot bear the thought of losing the only friend he’s known.
Once the ship returns home to the massive BnL fantasy spaceship, Wall-E
continues to tag along and follow wherever he sees Eve going, even though she is in
complete shut down. Aboard the Axiom, the passengers are all extremely, insanely obese
and have suffered extreme bone loss from the hundreds of years of living and relying
100% on the technology of the ship. The automated systems show every human is
permanently in a lazy boy type chair that strolls automatically whenever they please to
go, the system also transports all of their meals, whatever they please through a straw, the
systems allow them to video chat, play all both physical and video games and such
virally; the automated technology system of the ships makes it so the humans never ever
have to get up and never ever do or have for hundreds of years. The captain of the ship
follows just as all other humans aboard do, including leaving complete control of the
Axiom ship to its robotic pilot controlled by the automated systems.
As Wall-E continues to follow Eve, he travels to the bridge of the space ship
where the captain discovers that Eve’s mission came back with signs of actual life living
on Earth and that Earth is now habitable once again, and they must return home at once.
The captain announces the Axiom will hyper-jump to Earth just as the plan has been for
hundreds of years once they got evidence of living life again among it’s soils. The auto-
pilot however, turns against this mission and secretly has the plant stolen to try and
conceal any evidence that Eve found of living life on Earth.

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 The movie builds from here and goes on a up and down rollercoaster of the battles
that the Captain as well as Wall-E and Eve are fighting to win. Wall-E is battling to retain
Eve again since the evidence was declared unrecognized by the autopilot, GO4. The
captain struggles on his own to even build the muscle in his legs again to stand to fight
the automated GO4 system with his determination to return to real living life. After a
long battle from both sides, good versus bad of automated technology and human bodies’
with severe bone loss, the plant is successful restored back into the hyper-jump
automated system slot and the Axiom is sent back to Earth. Wall-E and Eve join the
human as well as robot passengers in restoring living human life among the Earth’s
environment.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s Carnival theory is consistently clearly displayed through the
entire film of Wall-E. Bakhtin explains his theory as a transgressive symbolism that
actually validates social norms, (Bakhtin, 1983,1993). He furthermore states that we
come to understand the role of those norms through a mockery of them, (Danesi). The
ways of carnivalesque genres are intended to fly in the face of our social norms of our
society to use the art of mockery with it’s audiences. Wall-E displays the carnival theory
in a few of the most obvious point of the movie through the morbid obesity that has
resulted in human beings, through the idea of our world becoming more and more relied
on technology until it back fires, and through the theme of how humans have seem to
have lost the reality of what reality and actually living life is about.
Along with the reoccurring theme of carnivalesque characteristics, throughout
Pixar’s Wall-E, Levi Strauss’ theme of binary opposites also is clearly developed
throughout. Strauss’ theory states that the way we understand the meaning of words is not
so much by what they mean directly, but depends more on what their difference is, the
meaning of their opposite. Humans use these oppositions as symbols of social norms,
issues, and ideas. Opposition allows us to recognize the phonemes of a language through
a derived technique in which consists in comparing sounds in minimal pairs to see if a
difference in meaning results, (Danesi).
We constantly refer to these relationships of opposing ideas to understand.
Strauss’ idea of the opposition theory often reverts to those of young-versus-old age,
father-versus-son, good-versus-evil, man-versus-women, and so on. The opposition

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theme that is clearly presented in Wall-E is that of nature-versus-technology. Wall-E take
the opposition struggle that our society becoming more and more tech-savvy is moving
towards. Wall-E takes the role of nature-versus-technology to a new level by how much
automated systems come to control human life. The carnival theory mocks the laziness
and obesity of our society, which leads them to being entirely relied on the automated
technology. The entire struggle of the plot of Wall-E builds off of the fight that the
automated pilot, GO4 has against the nature of human life with the captain. The
opposition really takes a clear role in the film as the technology starts to turn on the
nature of human beings, as they want to return to living the natural life they were put on
the Earth to once live.
As this opposition theory plays out in the climax of the movie, there is a
relationship that viewer’s form seeing the struggle of nature-versus-technology and thus
turning to the opposition of good-versus-evil. Nature being the good side of the opposing
relationship and evil being the technology side of the relationship, both are necessary to
successfully symbolize the social issues and ideas of life.
I think Wall-E has an extreme deep impact on our society by the fact that it
portrays carnivalesque mockery of laziness humans are moving towards with the
opposing battles of our society’s nature-versus-technology. The direct effects of Wall-E
on its’ viewers is a first hand wake-up call to the society we are currently evolving in
today. Americans in particular have be consistently been recorded with record high rates
of obesity among children as well as adults. The primary reason for this is the
comfortable lazy ways of life that we have developed. We currently live in a society
where we strive for better, faster, and the absolute best of every tech-savvy instrument we
can get our hands on. People want more and more technology as soon as it is released to
where the advancements are slowly starting to turn our society completely relying our
hands in it.
Evan Hutchinson of AssociatedContent.com explains the message that Wall-E
gives of our society when he wrote, “In a nutshell: more technology, less exercise, more
unhealthy eating, more laziness and self-centeredness. WAKE UP AMERICA! THIS IS
GOING TO BE YOU IN 50 YEARS!!!” (Hutchinson). Obesity rates continue to climb in
America and majority of children turn to fast food chains such as McDonalds or Burger

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King on a daily basis as part of their routine. The effects that Wall-E has on its viewers
start with the kids who view it and find some humor in how pathetic human life seems to
become once we live in a world that solely is completely dependably on automated
technology.
Wall-E does portray a significant message about obesity and laziness of our
society, however, I think the most significant way the film effects us is by the message is
sends on how technology will win against us in the end. More technology enables
workers to do their jobs without as much physical exertion, (Hutchinson). We love
technology! The new found developments with the iPhone, iPad and Smart Phones that
seem to be able to do pretty much anything we ask of it is leading our society into serious
danger. Media convergence is allowing our society to become more tech-savvy, coming
up with new ways to develop new technology to do anything for us that it can so that we
practically do nothing. The nature-versus-technology opposition comes into play here
with the fact that Wall-E shows that technology cannot do everything. The more technical
we build our world to become, yes the less we as humans have to do and the lazier we
get, but that is not our major problem with this phenomenon. Technology, robots, phones,
computers, or even the most tech-savvy gadget that has not even been developed yet
cannot come to completely control human life. Wall-E significantly displays this matter
and how happiness was not found there and with the key conclusion that in the end,
technology will out do us at one point and will turn against us.
Wall-E is much more than just an adorable animation love story between robots.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s Carnival theory is applied throughout the film as it building in
mockery of our societal norms of laziness and obesity that continues to rise in Americans
today. Levi Strauss’ binary opposition theory is applied to viewers through the
relationship of a struggle that builds between human-versus-technology. This film is by
far one of the cutest, sweet computer-animated love stories, but it is in the hidden
symbolic messages that make the film such a remarkably rememberable film to
America’s society.

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 Works Cited

Benford, Gregory, and Elisabeth Malartre. "Wall-E's' World May Not Be so Far Away

After All." Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles] 18 June 2008. Print.

Danesi, Marcel. "Semoitics of Media and Culture." 125-50. Print.

Hutchinson, Evan. "Disney's WALL-E Sends a Message to America: You're Fat! Do

Something!" Associated Content (2008). Web. 18 Mar. 2011.

<http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/850587/disneys_walle_sends_a

_message_to_america.html?cat=40>.

Levi Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth." The Journal of American Folklor.

Vol. 68. American Folklore Society, 1955. 428-44. Print.

Morson, Gary Soul, and Carl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,

1990. Print.

Wall-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Perf. Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, and Jeff Garlin. Walt

Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, 2008. Internet Movie Database.

Web. 12 Mar. 2011. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/>.

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