The advent of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001 was a great stride forward for animation, a medium that had until that point experienced very limited success in the realm of arbitrary award receiving. For those who do not remember, Shrek was the first ever recipient of this prize, beating Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (not a bad little film, if I may say so) and Monsters Inc. (WHAT?!?). As a fan of animation in all its forms, I was pretty stoked that the Academy had created a category for films that usually received the shaft outside of the Best Original Song. The creation of a new Oscar category was not without its flaws, however, and on no Academy Award broadcast was this more apparent than the 81st Annual one. The Best Picture nominees that year were:Slumdog Millionaire
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The nominees for Best Animated Feature were:
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
WALL-E
I'm sure you've already noticed the problem, but I will elaborate anyway. THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR WAS WALL-E AND IT COULDN'T EVEN WIN! I mean, yes, WALL-E went home with a commendable prize, but not the prize it deserved. By relegating it to the cartoon ghetto, the Academy stripped WALL-E of its chance to go home with the biggest trophy of the evening. Somewhere Beauty and the Beast are turning over in the their neighboring graves.
The winner of Best Picture that year, Slumdog Millionaire, was all right, but what do you remember about it other than that kid jumping into a big pile of shit? And the other nominees. WTF? Frost/Nixon? More like Yawn/Boring. Milk? I'm still not sure what The Reader is, though I've heard Kate Winslet shows her boobies, which I guess isn't a big deal if you've seen Titanic, or as I like to call it, Tit-tanic (oh, boy). And from what I've heard, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about as fun as falling through the hole in an Indian Port-o-Potty into a pile of human waste. WALL-E was not only the best film of 2008, but it was my favorite, and in the end only my opinion matters. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start enjoying this blog.
WALL-E is essentially a quirky, indie rom-com with robots. And it's not one of those indie quirkfests you see pop up in clusters every other month on Netflix either. It's more like the indie rom-coms of yesteryear. Or, like, a French one. I believe in a past review I called it "Amelie with robots" or something. I like that. The love story between WALL-E and EVE is way more engaging than that of Jamal and Latika. Not only is WALL-E a great love story, but it's got a nifty environmental message too. WALL-E shows us an Earth destroyed by mindless human consumption and greed. The haunting images of America reduced to nothing more than a trash heap makes you think about what you can do to make sure that never happens in the real world. Conservative Republicans, however, don't like it when a movie makes them think and they took to the internets en masse to denounce WALL-E for it's bullshit hippy message of love for Mother Earth. Yeah, Republicans, fuck Pixar and it's tree-hugging agenda. Are those elitist liberal scumbags trying to tell us we can't build coal burning energy plants all over the place and rape our protected forest areas for oil? Forget that!
Ugh! Just joking about it makes me mad. It is downright maddening to think that anybody with a brain could watch a movie with a pro-Earth agenda and call it out. C'mon! What kind of message does that send to the next generation? You can disagree about abortion, evolution, and prayer in schools all you want, friends, but when it comes to taking care of the planet, I don't think there is much to debate about. Either do what we need to do to ensure a healthy, functioning environment or end up as humanoid blobs floating in space evicted from Earth forever. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to give up being able to see my dick.
My favorite part: Can I just say "all of it?"
Arbitrary Grade: A+
