WALL-E (2008) opens deep in outer space, and as the camera draws closer to Earth, the music and lyrics from one of Hello Dolly’s love songs, “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” accompany and highlight the cosmos, galaxies, and stars. “Somewhere Out There” amplifies our view of Earth from space. But as we get closer to the landmasses and oceans of Earth, they are obscured by brown and gray floating masses of space garbage that become clearer as the shot moves toward a cityscape piled with skyscrapers built from trash. They look like enormous termite hills between vacant buildings in an empty city devoid of sound except for the roaring wind and a rolling object playing “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” as it picks up and compacts garbage.
These contrasting visions of Earth introduce the two conflicting ideologies that ground the film’s rhetoric, those of Disney and Pixar Studios. Although produced and released by Disney, WALL-E reflects the postmodern viewpoint of Pixar Animation studios, the creators of the film, transforming the film and its protagonist, WALL-E into what Paul Wells calls an “American popular cultural artifact [sic]” that has “become the focus of a significant meta-commentary on American consumer values and social identity” (152). By critiquing consumerism so overtly, WALL-E also critiques Disney aesthetic and production values throughout much of the film. However, the film also reinforces a conservative romantic ideology found in classic Disney features from Snow White forward.
The philosophies driving both Pixar and Disney, then, impact the ideology represented in WALL-E. Until the film’s end, Pixar’s vision resonates in the film and provides a dystopic and mechanistic perspective in which a robot named WALL-E acts as a comic hero who empowers an apathetic, indolent, and lethargic human race on a centuries-long, luxury, solar-system, “cruise ship” vacation. WALL-E helps transform the hell of Earth into a home by following a narrative of environmental...