BuynLarge - hilarious web attack on excesses of capitalism by.. Disney?
In an upcoming Olympic games, athletes will be assessed on both their ability, but also their financial fitness. A new breed of corporate punk musicians, who previously sang about stable interest rates plan a one hour show based entirely on sponsored music. The Xanadu shopping pill, meanwhile, 'stimulates the euphoric buying experience' for consumers (although adverse side effects such as nausea and headaches may emerge if not taken while shopping).
The BuynLarge Corporation's website illustrates a future where one company effectively controls everything on the planet - from industry and media to the world clock, government, and, even North on the compass. If it want's to stop paying tax, it can. It's opponants such as anarchists and anti-consumer groups, are in fact 'customers we haven't reached yet'. To top it all the site is littered with cringable stock photography and a web-standards unfriendly Flash interface.
And the source of this smart (and wet myself funny) illustration of the nightmare Stalinist totalitarian future for unchecked global capitalism? Adbusters, perhaps? Greenpeace or Armando Iannucci or Chris Morris?
It's actually Disney subsidiary PIxar
and the new promotion site for 2008's Wall-E. While most of us in the
UK are waiting to get to see Rataouille (which I saw at Edinburgh this
week and is reportedly topping the audience award already - review and
Edinburgh write up soon!) publicity for the final film of the original
Stanton-Lasseter- slate is heating up. The film, conceived over a
legnedary lunch shortly before the release of Toy Story, where A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo
were also formed, looks like Pixar's first attempt at a love story,
through the heart of an R2D2 like robot. Says Disney's head of
animation, John Lasster:
WALL-E is the story of the last little robot on Earth. He is a robot that his programming was to help clean up. You see, it's set way in the future. Through consumerism, rampant, unchecked consumerism, the Earth was covered with trash. And to clean up, everyone had to leave Earth and set in place millions of these little robots that went around to clean up the trash and make Earth habitable again.
Well, the cleanup program failed with the exception of this one little robot and he's left on Earth doing his duty all alone. But it's not a story about science fiction. It's a love story, because, you see, WALL-E falls in love with [Eve], a robot from a probe that comes down to check on Earth, and she's left there to check on and see how things are going and he absolutely falls in love with her
It sounds promising - according to the Wikipedia entry, director Andrew Stanton developed WALL-E before Toy Story was made:[3]. After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt, "[W]e had really achieved the physics of believing you were really under water, so I said 'Hey, let’s do that with air.' I said, 'Let’s do that with air. Let’s fix our lenses, let’s get the depth of field looking exactly how anthropomorphic lenses work and do all these tricks that make us have the same kind of dimensionality that we got on Nemo with an object out in the air and on the ground.'"[3] The design of WALL-E and Eve came about by Stanton telling his designers, "See it as an appliance first, and then read character into it."[3] There is no traditional dialogue in the film; Stanton joked, "I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie", in reference to voice artist/sound designer Ben Burtt's work on Star Wars. To create dialogue, Burtt took various mechanical sounds, and combined them to resemble dialogue.[4] Producer Jim Morris added that the film was animated so that it would feel "as if there really was a cameraman."