Pixar’s Little Tramp

(Originally published on MOLI 7/1/8)

Here’s my antidote for junk kid culture: good kid culture. Your daughter zoning out on preteen Disney musicals? Rent Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. Hyper-driven, commercial-laden Nick programming driving you nuts? Throw Modern Times in the DVD player. Cries for Happy Meals driving you crazy? Go out for sushi. My son hasn’t kicked his Hannah Montana crush or Power Rangers habit, but he knows the words to a dozen Beatles songs and loves Charlie Chaplin. And his favorite breakfast is a tin of surimi from the local Latin takeout restaurant: inch-long eels smothered in olive oil and peppers and garlic.

I’m not bragging about my five-year-old’s sophisticated taste. Okay, I am bragging — but I’m making a point too. A huge part of a parent’s job is to curate and expose him to culture. For me, it’s so much fun singing “Ticket to Ride” with Cole, I can’t even call it a job.

Of course, as long as Pixar’s around, you can trust your offspring with at least some of today’s pop culture. With Wall-E, the kings of animation have hit the ball way out of the park.

Anthropomorphic robots are a staple of cartoons and sci-fi; Robots and The Iron Giant are also excellent kiddie flicks. But rarely has a nuts-and-bolts character had the vaudevillian soul of Wall-E. He looks more than a little like E.T., and he serves a similar function: as an emissary from another planet (which in this case used to be our planet) who reminds us humans of the humanity we’ve lost in ourselves (ditto Iron Giant).

With his sad eyes, forlorn shabby appearance, and slapstick pratfalls, Wall-E also draws a lot on Chaplin. Like the Little Tramp, he will do just about anything for love. In Eve, he finds a va-va-voom modern girlfriend.

But Wall-E is no mere sentimental cartoon: It’s a pointed apocalpytic parable. Wall-E and his pet cockroach seem to be the sole inhabitants of an environmentally blighted Earth. Fat, lazy humans with their greed and consumerism have buried the planet in trash and then fled. It’s An Inconvenient Truth come to cartoon life.

Despite my opening graf, I’m not really a total snob. I like a lot of kid’s movies — better than most adult ones. We have a running joke in our house that we haven’t seen a new film that doesn’t feature a talking animal in years. And I don’t really mind.

Wall-E is quite simply one of the best. It’s definitely up there with Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Bambi. The landscapes and artistic direction in the film are stunning, their towering bleakness lightened with comic touches, like the robot’s collection of found objects (a Rubik’s cube, lighters, a tape of Hello, Dolly! that provides the film’s unlikely soundtrack and romantic analogy). New York Times critic A.O. Scott called the first 40 minutes a “cinematic poem,” and that’s not wrong. Wall-E is the antidote. And the fact that millions are taking it in makes me feel more hopeful than ever about November 4.

This entry was posted on September 11, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under Populism, Cute Thing Cole Did. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.