Ooh, I'm pretty excited about the latest Pixar project, Wall-E. They compare it to a Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton silent film (well, Wall-E is a lipless robot, after all), and above all, it's going to be a genuine love story. Sounds different from the previous Pixar films right? The human race has been transported to some other planet, and get this: they are all obese and ride around on some sort of robotic wheelchair-loungers drinking super-sized soft drinks. Har har.
One particularly interesting thing mentioned in the article is what elements they use in the movie to help audiences connect to a movie made with CG about robots. The combination of CG and robots is very heavily fantastical. Since both the story and the visual story are so laden with fantasy, this is where the importance of sound comes into the picture. They bring in sounds from reality- like a hand-cranked WWII army generator- and sounds that are familiar to us- like E.T.'s "throat-singing"- to give us a link to unfamiliar, alien territory. Here is the premise of the story in the writer/director's own words:
"...the point of my story, which was the premise that irrational love defeats life’s programming, and that the most robotic beings I’ve met are us.”
Sounds a bit contradictory, no? Well I'm sold, and I can't wait to see it! The first part of his premise is in line with my thinking that we humans are fundamentally irrational creatures. You could tell us that this is the reasonable thing to do, but time and time again, we will do opt for the unreasonable thing to do. Well, maybe not opt- it's more driven by something other than conscious choice. Why do girls fall for the bad guys? Why do men love bitches? (No, I haven't read the book.) Why does she keep going back to him when it's clearly not to her advantage (in terms of happiness) to do so? Irrational love- it's what gives us stories- books, movies, and myths.
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