Saturday, June 28, 2008

Grandpa and Wall·E

I was asked to throw together a design for a t-shirt for our family reunion coming up... and I thought of all the cheesy (and poorly designed) reunion t-shirts I've seen in the past. Does anybody wear those in public after the reunion? I wanted to make something that would be a little goofy but still funny enough to wear in public. Mission accomplished? We'll see how the family reacts...



(That fine looking gentleman is my grandpa circa 1970. The quote is an old Coca-Cola slogan from the early 1900's.)

On a completely unrelated note, my wife and I saw Pixar's "Wall·E" yesterday (and are going again today). I went in with high hopes...and left kind of discouraged. Pixar did an absolutely masterful job with the main character--who knew that a robot could be so expressive? The visuals were amazing as well. I just have a few beefs:

  1. I found myself getting extremely bored whenever Wall·E wasn't on screen-- I didn't think the other characters were quite as engaging.
  2. The mixture of real humans with CG just didn't work for me. To me, the goal of film (and especially animation) is to transport the viewer from their theater seat into a totally different world. But the illusion of life just wasn't there -- the CG humans and the real humans didn't look like they belonged in the same world (I guess 700 years will not only lower your bone mass but also make you look more like a cartoon).
  3. I read that the premise of the film wasn't too preachy, but I kinda thought otherwise...

Again, Pixar does absolutely incredible work (Ratatouille changed the direction of my life) and who am I to question them? This film is getting rave reviews, so what do I know? I think I just went in with too high hopes...I'm seeing the film again today, so maybe I'll have a totally different experience.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree with you more. I found this film somewhat tiresome and there seriously was a point when I really felt uncomfortable with the amount of 'green'! I often like to find one sentance in the movie that kind of sums up the whole film...and the fact that this movies theme sentance was something like 'it just needs someone to take care of it..' kind of- stunk. I feel like I do a pretty good job of taking care of my piece of earth. ?? Maybe I'm naive. You're hot!