Saw WALL-E last night. It was another good movie from Pixar, featuring another great short beforehand called "Presto." I wouldn't put it up there with Nemo, Monsters, and Ratatoulle, and they played up the cuteness factor a bit too much with their mini Johnny 5, but still definitely worth seeing.
What struck me about the movie was the very blatant anti-consumerism message. It was like they took a page out of The Story of Stuff (mentioned in an earlier post and still very much worth watching) and fast-forwarded to a sci-fi-worthy version of the future where people are fat, lazy, and have every impulse both generated and satisfied by a Walmart-like superstore. This animated comedy highlights perceived obsolescence ("blue is the new red!"), the power of advertisements and media (the average American is exposed to 3,000 ads per day!), the inability of new technology to increase happiness (also mentioned in The Paradox of Choice, definitely worth a read), and the general downside of our current pattern of externalized costs.
I was pretty psyched to see these topics covered in this way. Kids can't hear this stuff enough, especially since they'll probably have to start cleaning up this mess.
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Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Johnny 5 is Alive!
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