Postmodern films want to draw the audiences’ attention to the fact they’re watching a movie that tells a story in a way that changes the meaning of storytelling. It wants to also make aware of how other movies are encoded with meaning that "controls" thinking about what is normal and proper. Wall-E, a major Pixar movie, is a great example of postmodernism.
Wall-E is a critique of modernity, and the fate of man under consumerist technology. Set in the distant dystopian future, this film tells the story of a grubby little robot left behind to help clean up Earth. Humanity, having trashed the planet with junk from its over-consumption, has lit out for deep space aboard a luxury space liner called the Axiom. The little robot in the movie, …show more content…
It also created the fantastic spaceship that allowed humanity to escape the planet it ruined by denying its own limits. But technology also shaped humans' consciousness. It led them to break with nature and see technology as something that delivered them from work and struggle. As humanity became more technologically sophisticated they became ever more separate from nature, and their own nature. They developed a culture and society that was mechanistic and artificial, as opposed to organic and natural. Wall-E contends that what makes us fully human is cultivating our own deepest nature by working, and working together. Humanity renews the face of the Earth through its own labor, by people taking responsibility for themselves instead of being passive consumers coddled by the corporate welfare state. Unlike the usual idea of science fiction, the machines in Wall-E don't turn on man, but liberate man from enslavement to machines. Ironically, then, this Pixar movie is a creative but full-frontal attack on modernity. Wall-E opens up the discerning viewer's imagination, inviting him to consider what authentic personal and communal human goods we have lost as we've gained prosperity and mastery over nature and how we might get them back. "Wall-E" is the kind of movie that presents planting a garden as a revolutionary act.
Wall-E is a critique of modernity, and the fate of man under consumerist technology. Set in the distant dystopian future, this film tells the story of a grubby little robot left behind to help clean up Earth. Humanity, having trashed the planet with junk from its over-consumption, has lit out for deep space aboard a luxury space liner called the Axiom. The little robot in the movie, …show more content…
It also created the fantastic spaceship that allowed humanity to escape the planet it ruined by denying its own limits. But technology also shaped humans' consciousness. It led them to break with nature and see technology as something that delivered them from work and struggle. As humanity became more technologically sophisticated they became ever more separate from nature, and their own nature. They developed a culture and society that was mechanistic and artificial, as opposed to organic and natural. Wall-E contends that what makes us fully human is cultivating our own deepest nature by working, and working together. Humanity renews the face of the Earth through its own labor, by people taking responsibility for themselves instead of being passive consumers coddled by the corporate welfare state. Unlike the usual idea of science fiction, the machines in Wall-E don't turn on man, but liberate man from enslavement to machines. Ironically, then, this Pixar movie is a creative but full-frontal attack on modernity. Wall-E opens up the discerning viewer's imagination, inviting him to consider what authentic personal and communal human goods we have lost as we've gained prosperity and mastery over nature and how we might get them back. "Wall-E" is the kind of movie that presents planting a garden as a revolutionary act.