Life, Love, and Programming: the Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer Animation

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Eric Herhuth

Cinema Journal, Volume 53, Number 4, Summer 2014, pp. 53-75 (Article)

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Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer Animationby ERIC HERHUTH

Abstract: Given Pixar’s initial standardization of computer-animated feature fi lms, this ar-ticle examines the studio’s relation to digital modernization and to animation’s legacy of subversion through an analysis of WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The fi lm exemplifi es themes of modernization and subversion, and it demonstrates how a playful alienation of naturalized norms can distract from the narrative’s perpetuation of specifi c cultural values and practices. The narrative of WALL-E gives essentialist status to liberal desire and heterosexuality through robot characters presented in juxtaposition to consumer-ist, infantile, human characters. The portrayal of these sociocultural norms within the fi ctional space of the fi lm (both on Earth and in outer space) is compounded by the playful space of animation itself. Pixar’s computer animation, if represented by WALL-E, presents itself as free for the essence of technology and the human to emerge but simul-taneously functions as a space for precise control that is a corollary to the proliferation of programmed, algorithmic media.

Animation’s legacy of subversion can be traced back to early trick fi lms, lightning sketches and comics, and the modernist avant-garde.1 The industrializationof hand-drawn animation, its integration into Hollywood, and its standard-ization as children’s entertainment have in turn defused much of the me-

dium’s association with subversion, disruption, and distortion. The production processes, creative tools, and aesthetic goals have certainly changed since Sergei Eisenstein praised early Disney animation for its protean, plasmatic qualities.2

Nevertheless, this legacy remains active, as the recent work of queer theorist Jack Halberstam and media scholar Scott Bukatman attests. Both of their books high-light the tendency for animated media to challenge social order as well as physical rules. Bukatman traces a history of rebellious animated characters or “disobedi-ent machines” back to Winsor McCay and others, and Halberstam analyzes the

1 Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (New York: Verso, 2004).

2 Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta, India: Seagull Books, 1986).

Eric Herhuth is a PhD candidate in English and teaches for the Global Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His research areas include theories of modernization, animation and cinema studies, and media and globalization, and his dissertation is titled “Pixar’s Modernization Project: Culture, Aesthetics, and Politics in Early Pixar, 1995–2010.” This essay won the SCMS Student Writing Award in 2013.

Cinema Journal 53 | No. 4 | Summer 2014

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rebelliousness that pervades contemporary animated films for children, Pixar films in particular.3 Within animation history, Disney-owned Pixar has certainly established a privileged position, but to what extent has Pixar continued or modified this occasion-ally overstated legacy of subversion through its advancement of computer animation and its crowd-pleasing storytelling? Asking this question of Pixar has serious implications for understanding the recent history of the medium, given the studio’s highly visible position as an industry stan-dard and tech-startup success story, at least during the 1990s and early 2000s. Pixar’s prominent position within the technological climate and expansive mediascape of this period compels investigation into how their narratives and aesthetics have participated in this recent phase of modernization, which includes the proliferation of computer programming, digital media, and communication networks, as well as anxieties about human intimacy and new technological forms of life. To begin to answer these large questions, this article focuses on Pixar’s WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), a film that explicitly addresses modernization and subversion. I argue that computer animation has a critical role in the aforementioned context as it provides a medium for reexam-ining nature and exploring digital space but that a close reading of WALL-E demon-strates how the play of alien and naturalized elements can distract from the narra-tive’s perpetuation of specific cultural values and practices: heterosexuality and liberal desire. Using this film to better understand Pixar’s place within animation’s legacy of subversion and recent phases of modernization is a problematic that involves complex relationships among medium, diegesis, production, and recent cultural and political formations. Using recent scholarship in animation studies, theories of technical me-dia, comments from director Andrew Stanton, and Walter Benjamin’s ideas about animation and cinema, this article establishes WALL-E’s reflexive relation to computer animation and its broad historical and sociocultural relevance, and it theorizes how computer animation has denaturalized the cinematic experience for the digital age. Contexts of modernization are present from the film’s beginning, for instance. WALL-E opens with a vast scene of space that slowly converges on the planet Earth, but the sprawling, bird’s-eye shots reveal the planet to be shrouded by smog, covered by trash, and abandoned except for one robot. This opening is accompanied by the song “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” ( Jerry Herman, 1965) from Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969), the musical that supplies the film with thematic music as well as clips that assist in characterizing the animated, robot protagonist and in developing the film’s nostal-gic, sci-fi tone.4 Set in a stylized 1890, Hello, Dolly! depicts the draw of modernization and urbanization, but an additional correlative emerges through the context of the 1960s, when Hello, Dolly! was released: namely, the space race. This series of references (1890, 1960s, early 2000s) poses distinct forms of modernization in a unified series. By

3 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and The Animating Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

4 The sound, music, and original score for the film have been linked not only to sci-fi and nostalgia but also to the musical genre. Kathryn A. T. Edney and Kit Hughes, “‘Hello WALL-E!’: Nostalgia, Utopia, and the Science Fiction Musical,” in Sounds of the Future: Essays on Music in Science Fiction Film, ed. Mathew J. Bartkowiak (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 44–66.


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the time of the census of 1890 in the United States, the American frontier was officially closed, and transportation technologies were making the world smaller, effectively res-caling how people experienced and thought about space and time.5 By the late 1960s, the Cold War space race had altered how people conceived of the world, whether from fear of spy satellites or the global, ideological reach of media, as demonstrated by the 1968 photograph of the whole Earth taken by Apollo 8.6 At the beginning of WALL-E, then, this ethos of space, exploration, and human perspective partly introduces the audience to the film’s own diegetic space and partly alludes to the film’s response and contribution to the context of modernization emergent in the late twentieth century. The following analysis of the film’s speculative, distant-future perspective has less to do with any actual future and more to do with a now-recent past. That future perspective presents a postapocalyptic scenario in which industry and consumerism have devastated Earth, but in hyperbolic fashion, humans continue to rely on technological advances to secure a comfortable future. In summary, after cov-ering Earth with trash to the extent that it is no longer inhabitable, humans are forced to flee into space. There they enjoy a cruise-ship atmosphere in which advanced tech-nology and the corporate state Buy-n-Large meet all their needs. Meanwhile, robots are left on Earth to clean up the mess. The spaceship that the humans live on, the Axiom, sends probes back to Earth to search for plant life (similar to the Genesis story of Noah and the ark). Roughly seven hundred years since the Axiom’s departure, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth Class) appears to be the only robot remaining on Earth; he is still laboring to clean up trash, but he has developed into a sentient, intelligent being and is deeply intrigued when the EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) probe arrives. WALL-E finds a plant that EVE confiscates, and upon EVE’s return to the Axiom with the plant, the ship begins to descend to Earth. However, the ship’s autopilot, Auto, leads a mutiny against the Axiom’s regressed human captain. Through a series of intended and unintended exploits, WALL-E, EVE, a team of “rogue robots,” and Captain B. McCrea defeat Auto and return the Axiom to Earth. The central irony of the story is WALL-E’s development, his adoption of human characteristics, and then the process through which he reintroduces this humanity to the community on the Axiom. This story’s address of technology, industry, and consumers has elicited conten-tious commentary as well as positive reviews, but comments made by director Andrew Stanton in particular focus on themes of technology, subversion, and modernization. WALL-E evoked criticism from many conservative commentators in the United States for its negative portrayal of consumers and its environmentalist message, and the on-line discussion among critics demonstrates how various factions—environmentalists, political conservatives, and born-again Christians—have claimed the essence of the

5 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 10–35, 131–210.

6 Lisa Parks and James Schwoch, eds., Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 7–8; for a more comprehensive discussion of this context, see James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).


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film as resonant with their respective positions.7 The apocalyptic environmentalist message is not the film’s theme, according to Stanton, which is rather that “irrational love defeats life’s programming.” He continues in an interview, “I realized that that’s a perfect metaphor for real life. We all fall into our habits, our routines and our ruts, consciously or unconsciously to avoid living.”8 After seven hundred years of habits, the humans on the Axiom are hyperbolic consumers and the robots exist to follow their “directives.” The humans hover around their ship on floating deck chairs, all commu-nication taking place through personal media screens and large visual screens that line the faux cityscape; humans are presented as bored and sedentary, and as infantile in mind and shape (space life has diminished their bone density). The robots, meanwhile, are programmed and designed to serve the humans and carry out the labor necessary to maintain the ship and the society. WALL-E, in contrast, serves as a comic hero, inspired by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, disrupting the standardized, rational-ized, and programmed practices of life and labor on the Axiom.9 Thus, WALL-E’s character represents Stanton’s “irrational love” and the setting on the Axiom represents “life’s programming,” but as I will show here, Stanton’s articulation of a “metaphor for real life” is much more oppositional and static than what the film actually presents. In fact, while guided by the director’s vision about programming and love, the film provides a narrative capable of challenging the dichotomous terms of that vision. Be-ginning from Stanton’s thematization, this argument proceeds by examining the con-flation of desires and directives that undermine “irrational love,” then the culture of programming that exceeds “life’s programming.” The final two sections investigate the reflexivity of the narrative in relation to computer animation and animation aesthet-ics to begin to answer how the medium contributes to posthuman, digital-age politics and how it can be positioned in media history, particularly in relation to Benjaminian theories of cinema, human perception, and ideas of nature.

Directives/Desires. An analysis of the emergence of robot life in WALL-E reveals a common modern notion of desire—its basis in an ontological lack and symboliza-tion—but it also uncovers confusion about how this desire grows out of programmed machines. This confusion troubles Stanton’s vision for the film but contributes to an ideological tension within the narrative structure. That structure presupposes a formal difference between WALL-E the robot and the humans aboard the Axiom, that is, the humans have forgotten a vital part of their humanity that WALL-E restores. Con-trary to that presupposition, the emergence of robot life reintroduces recognizable,

7 For example, see Patrick J. Ford, “WALL-E’s Conservative Critics,” American Conservative, June 30, 2008, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wall-es-conservative-critics/; Ali Flick, “Right-Wing Apoplectic over Pixar’s WALL-E: ‘Malthusian Fear Mongering,’ ‘Fascistic Elements,’” Think Progress, July 1, 2008, http://thinkprogress .org/2008/07/01/right-wing-hates-wall-e/.

8 Steve Fritz, “How Andrew Stanton & Pixar Created WALL*E—Part II,” Newsarama, July 4, 2008, http://www .newsarama.com/film/080704-wall-e-stanton-2.html.

9 See the film production notes, “WALL-E Production Notes,” Walt Disney Pictures, June 12, 2008, http://adisney .go.com/disneypictures/wall-e/media/downloads/WALLEProductionNotes.pdf. Keaton made films with an engineered, mathematical style that suited modernity and Keaton’s own personality as a tinkerer and engineer. See Charles Wolfe, “Buster Keaton: Comic Invention and the Art of Moving Pictures,” in Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, ed. Patrice Petro (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 41–64.


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normative forms of desire and sexuality that are not substantially different from the consumerist ideology practiced on the Axiom. Instead of forms of “irrational love” that encourage alternative ways of living, the sentient robots essentialize cultural norms while simultaneously behaving in seemingly disruptive patterns. The development of the character WALL-E presents abstract desire, or that human capacity to desire almost anything, which is figured quite literally by WALL-E’s empty-container body. For WALL-E and the other robots in the film, this abstract desire evolves from the “directive” that each is programmed to follow. WALL-E’s develop-ment involves a shift from strictly following his directive to compact and stack trash to a broader set of activities that includes collecting, organizing, and decorating, as well as watching, listening to, and imitating a miraculously preserved copy of Hello, Dolly! When EVE (the name evoking the biblical narrative and beginning her gendered characterization) appears with her own directive to find plant life on Earth, WALL-E abandons his evolving directive altogether to vie for EVE’s attention. In a key sequence in this first act, WALL-E shows EVE a plant that he found, which satisfies EVE’s pro-grammed search (she literally puts the plant inside her hollow body), signals a shuttle from the Axiom, and reduces EVE to a catatonic state. WALL-E continues to court the unresponsive EVE, which indicates his assumption that EVE can develop a desire for him as well. This shared capacity for desire is visually reinforced by the empty bodies featured in both robots. Further, this “irrational love” appears to develop foremost dur-ing WALL-E’s repeated viewing of Hello, Dolly!, a kind of training that prepares the way for EVE. But this training is able to shape WALL-E only because of the malleable state of his directive, which has become abstract or substitutable. Hello, Dolly! presents a couple of fundamental themes for socializing WALL-E. First, it is about matchmaking, young love, leaving the country for the city, and learn-ing how to dance and court a partner. But second, it is about the union of an older couple. The protagonist Dolly Levi (Barbra Streisand) is a widow and a matchmaker by profession who adroitly courts the accomplished bachelor Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau). The heterosexual coupling and marriage theme is subtly driven by the angst of Horace and Dolly as they face aging and death. This musical pro-vides WALL-E with examples of human intimacy, sexual desire, and consummation through dancing (which he and EVE fulfill in space), but it also displays a script for re-sponding to mortality. In this sense, WALL-E is exposed to a narrative understanding of life, with its implied beginnings and ends. These values confer an organization upon the robot character that is recognizably human, an organization made possible by WALL-E’s nascent, malleable form of robotic life. Heterosexuality, then, is rooted in this singular media experience and solidifies as he transitions from a state of ignorance and curiosity to one of knowledge and pursuit—when he learns what he really wants. The robot’s engagement with representational media cultivates a kind of knowledge and curiosity that adumbrates his capacity to venture off Earth and to fall in love. Analyzing a related character, Jack Halberstam discusses the fish Dory in Pixar’s Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, 2003) to argue that modes of forget-ting and stupidity can lead to alternative forms of knowledge that can challenge patri-archal and capitalist norms. Dory’s short-term memory loss prevents her from adhering to social rules and norms, but it does not prevent her from developing proficiencies in


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all kinds of other areas—she reads human, speaks whale, and is capable of befriend-ing sharks. Dory’s memory loss, which includes her forgetting her own family, opens up a space for “queerness” that enables her to form alternative relationships and be tremendously helpful to the other characters in the narrative. Dory breaks with his-torical and familial prescription, and as Halberstam describes her, “actually signals a new version of selfhood, a queer version that depends upon disconnection from the family and contingent relations to friends and improvised relations to community.”10 This alternative “version of selfhood” echoes the developmental narrative in WALL-E, but the character WALL-E passes through the phase of forgetting his directive, where he is without memory of family, identity, or norms, and develops a heterosexual ver-sion of normativity through Hello, Dolly!11 Unlike Dory, WALL-E, as the protago-nist, does not remain on the fringes of historical and cultural knowledge but in fact reconnects the humans to particular norms and practices of their past. Halberstam argues convincingly that computer-animated films tend to be about revolt, change, cooperation, and transformation, through her examples of Finding Nemo, Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000), and Toy Story ( John Lasseter, 1995), and that such revolutionary themes are often taken for granted in children’s films. While I concur, the film WALL-E hedges those themes with the preservation of certain conservative or traditional values. The spontaneous emergence of robot life does not provide a last-ing space for alternative personalities and societies to emerge; instead, it perpetuates particular norms—liberal desire and heterosexuality—without acknowledging their cultural particularity. This developmental narrative correlates with the notion that there is an ontological lack fundamental to human culture. Instead of following instincts, humans live with fewer prescriptions and make many more choices about how they spend their time. Beyond abstract desire, “liberal desire” here refers to the ability of an individual to choose what object to pursue. The robot WALL-E, for instance, chooses to pursue EVE through outer space by hitching a ride on the shuttle that returns her to the Axiom. But this choice is preceded by the disruptive presence of EVE, to whom WALL-E did not choose to be attracted. The narrative situates a portion of desire prior to choice, which resonates with the commonplace, psychoanalysis-influenced notion that present de-sires derive their force from past experience and prototypes.12 Frequently unconscious, these early memories tend to derive from prelinguistic phases of development. Desire, according to Jacques Lacan, mobilizes various symbolizations and significations, but it itself is never symbolized; it is part of the order of the “Real.” This order of the Real constitutes a lack in the subject created by the absolute desire for the Other that becomes repressed and substituted when a child develops language. The insatiable, unsymbolized lack produces the human capacity to desire just about anything.13 With

10 Halberstam, Queer Art, 74–82.

11 This narrative structure is more similar to Halberstam’s other example of 50 First Dates (Peter Segal, 2004), which fails to break with heteronormative patriarchy when Adam Sandler’s character makes a videotape for Drew Barry-more’s character, who suffers from short-term memory loss. The video provides a summary of past events, reconnect-ing Barrymore’s character to social and familial norms. Halberstam, Queer Art, 75–78.

12 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 88.

13 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 149–175.


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respect to WALL-E’s development, which lacks the verbal communication and family dynamics fundamental to psychoanalysis, it is possible to interpret the early moments in the film in which WALL-E is collecting objects out of the trash as an indication of symbolization: he has some precategorical desire (initiated by his directive or program-ming) that he is now trying to satisfy through other means, by filling himself and his cooler with the garbage of his choice, which for him becomes more significant than the compacting and stacking components of his directive. He reconfigures his directive by substituting cleaning for collecting, but the very act of substitution indicates that his directive has become unfixed and that what is more essential to WALL-E is the empty space of desire. This characterization gives WALL-E his strongest anthropomorphic qualities: the capacity for an array of desires and an ability to change his desires in response to changes in his environment. The film proposes that other robots’ programs and/or directives are not fixed either. In fact, like the hollow bodies of WALL-E and EVE, their programming conceals an empty space. Over time WALL-E’s playful, ha-bitual work with trash and media expand this emptiness, as if he realized that no one was watching him and with that knowledge, his motivation for following his directive ceased, and new directives and desires emerged.14

On the Axiom, the “rogue robots” develop sentience along the lines demonstrated by WALL-E. Having strayed from their directives, the robots are confined to the ship’s repair ward. Once WALL-E inadvertently frees all of them while rescuing EVE, the robots become loyal assistants to their emancipator. The most accelerated example of robot humanization, however, takes place when WALL-E enters the Axiom and meets M-O (Microbe-Obliterator), a small robot designed to clean the probes that return to the Axiom. WALL-E is filthy, and M-O immediately sets to cleaning, but as WALL-E races away in pursuit of EVE, he leaves a trail of filth. M-O sees this trail and is compelled to clean it, but this requires that he abandon his track, one of the many illuminated tracks on the floors of the Axiom that communicate with the robots and regulate their paths. M-O hesitates for a moment, then abandons the track to clean up WALL-E’s mess. M-O’s spontaneous, innovative response frees him from his directive—he no longer follows any tracks—and builds on the trope of WALL-E as a disruptive contagion. The programmed labor of the robots creates their capacity for desire; in their very design it seems that desire is a possibility.15 But the narratives of their development do not necessarily align with the kinds of life emergent in robotics and computer theory.

14 Isolation, being unseen, diminishes socially enforced responsibilities. WALL-E similarly loses a connection with an audience or public. Surveillance has long been considered a primary tool for disciplining and generating modern subjectivity, and WALL-E’s long-term isolation dissolves any surveillant force. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995). Moreover, the notion that WALL-E’s realization that there is no authority over his behavior leads to his love for EVE greatly troubles any Christian reading of the film (prompted by allusions to Adam and Eve, and Noah’s ark), which would need to maintain the authority of a seeing but unseen God.

15 The programming and design of the robots follows Freud’s “Anatomy is destiny,” as if their code determines their development; or following more recent theories of human evolution, it is as if the work of their bodies and the sensa-tions produced trigger and direct how intelligence develops. See Mark Coté, “Technics and the Human Sensorium: Rethinking Media Theory through the Body,” Theory and Event 13, no. 4 (2010), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals /theory_and_event/v013/13.4.cote.html.


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If the robots were part of an artificial-life experiment, their programming would begin with simple scripts that would produce spontaneous change through recursivity and feedback loops.16 But the robot characters do not portray this process; instead, they display qualitative leaps in which their behavior begins to resemble human behavior. The common stage of development for these fictional robots that leads to conscious-ness and heroics is the extraction of desire from its original, codified meaning; instead of pursuing their directives, they pursue what they want. The implication of WALL-E, who is left alone to work, is that the directive supplies an immutable capacity to pursue, but what is pursued is less fixed. In other words, their directives have a linguistic as well as a programmatic quality.17 This is how WALL-E moves from collecting, compact-ing, and stacking to mostly collecting, and then to only wanting EVE. This sliding is suggestive of Stanton’s thematization, “irrational love defeats life’s programming,” but it contains a contradiction. Notice how the more abstract, linguistic component of the directive-desire is characterized as essentially human. WALL-E moves from desiring to fill himself with objects, to just desiring other objects, to desiring intimacy with another, to desiring EVE specifically. M-O shifts from desiring to clean what and where the Axiom directs to desiring to clean wherever WALL-E leaves a trail of filth. How much does this differ from the humans who cruise around the Axiom, living for recreation and pursuing whatever pleasures they desire? Even though the abstract, essentialized desires of the liberated robots disrupt the habits of humans on the Axiom, these desires are similar to those underpinning the humans’ consumer habits. The film’s meditation on the human propensity to form habits—to delegate actions to the unconscious realm—proposes that breaking with programmed, conditioned behavior will come about through equally irrational and impersonal means—as when a heterological element (i.e., WALL-E) is introduced into a system and the system reconfigures itself to integrate that element. It is an example of the demotion of contemplative rationality, and it suggests that this habitual ratio-nality is an essential quality of humanity that the character WALL-E epitomizes and synthesizes with a robot form. This follows Stanton’s vision about irrational love, but it confuses the rational-irrational dichotomy by merging competing rationalities: pro-grammatic directives become abstract, liberal desire. It seems appropriate that a film with this confusion at its core has been claimed by competing groups to be representa-tive of their causes. WALL-E addresses not only the automaticity of machines and hu-mans working with machines but also an important ideology or script of governance found in liberal capitalist societies: the individual’s right to pursue happiness and enjoy life, which is what both the robots and the humans relearn.

16 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 224–231.

17 The difference between programming language and ordinary human language is that machine readability requires diminishing the play and ambiguity of signifiers as much as possible: “All computer languages, informed by the rigors of formal logic, may be seen as a result of a certain formalization and functionalization of language, whereby the ambiguity and complexity of ordinary language are reduced to rationalized structures, with a high predictability of procedure and outcome.” A. Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 145.


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In this formulation, labor figures as both a problem and a solution for such pursuits. A lack of work and enterprise contributes to the boredom and stagnation afflicting the humans aboard the Axiom. The robots’ programmatic capacity for labor produces their capacity for other desires; however, once liberated, the robots no longer labor as constantly and reliably as before. In short, the humans relearn the value of work and the robots learn the value of pleasure; and in both cases, it is out of the rationalized world of programming that the irrational emerges. WALL-E’s heterological character, as the catalyst for these processes of emergence, is less the product of an essential difference between him and the Axiom residents—they all follow a script for freely pur-suing their desires; instead, his revolutionary capacity stems from his isolated develop-ment on Earth. Since the Axiom’s cruise-ship social order is a cartoon of consumerism administered by a corporate state left on autopilot, distancing the comic hero from that logic helps generate the ideological tension propelling the film’s narrative. It is the film’s two distinct acts (WALL-E on Earth and WALL-E on the Axiom) that en-able the return-to-Earth, return-to-a-natural-equilibrium resolution. The difficulty (or humor) in this reading of the film is that instead of a pragmatic resolution, it offers an inevitable demise and then an inadvertent resolution, both driven by an essentialized, abstract form of desire. The upshot of this reading is that WALL-E’s pursuit of EVE, which saves the humans, is no less rational than the human pursuit of commodities and comforts that made Earth uninhabitable in the first place. In this way the film is more dialectical than Stanton’s binary formulation that poses “irrational love” against “life’s programming.” But Stanton’s reference to programming in conjunction with the narrative alludes to more than consumer habits. It also resonates with the film’s introductory allusion to modernization and to Pixar’s own production process.

The Culture of Programming. The narrative and the futuristic world in WALL-E al-lude to contemporary forms of modernization in which information and communica-tion technologies contribute to social and economic restructuring, and raise questions about changing notions of identity, intimacy, and personhood in a posthuman context. This context relates to Pixar’s own position in the computer animation industry, since its products are based on computer technologies and programming, and since anima-tors frequently imagine and produce representations of nonhuman forms of life. As this section elaborates, describing WALL-E as a film about programming emphasizes the relation of practice and appearance to ontology and essence. In other words, pro-gramming can refer to the external manifestations of action or to the internal, invisible codes that determine or at least delimit action. As already demonstrated, WALL-E conflates both formulations—robots with internal directives and humans conditioned by routine share an expression of essentialized, abstract desire. But in addition to the categories of desire and complementarity, this human-machine portrayal can be ana-lyzed in terms of difference and danger. The film’s emphasis on appearance and es-sence suggests that the crisis in a posthuman, futuristic context is not the threat of hu-mans going to war against artificial life forms, as in The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999) or The Terminator ( James Cameron, 1984). Instead, the culture of programming to which the film alludes threatens autonomous action, relational intimacy, and the virtues of contingency. Again, rather than meaningful subversion


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through a “disobedient machine,” the film portrays a programming culture that en-sures its perpetuation through a comfortable acceptance of artificial life and computer programming. Computer programming and algorithms have served as dominant thematic meta-phors for modern life since the emergence of information technologies during the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, there was a general shift from the discourse about the “human motor” to a discourse about the “human computer.”18 The common denominator in these analogies is an approach to understanding the human as a machine, but their respective usages mark periods of modernization in which definitions of the human have been revised in response to technological, in-dustrial, and economic developments. In the case of the human computer, informa-tion is central: in cybernetic models, information can be organic, inorganic, or some combination of the two, as long as information is defined by distinguishing patterns from noise. N. Katherine Hayles refers to this reduction as the disembodiment of information, and she argues against discounting the significance of material embodi-ment in the development of life—human and nonhuman.19 The bifurcation of bodily experience and disembodied information is itself a habit of thought frequently traced back to Cartesian philosophy, Christianity, and other Western, early modern cultural formations. In contrast to this tradition, many modern philosophers and historians of science and technology, such as Hayles, have sought to revise, challenge, and debunk subject-object, culture-nature, and human-nonhuman bifurcations.20 WALL-E con-tributes to this discussion through its presentation of machine life and its highlighting of a general comfort with artificial materials and embodiment. In WALL-E, the development of life, or rather, its characterization and personifica-tion, utilizes material embodiment to a limited extent. The robots’ bodies, with their replaceable parts and functional design, contribute to but do not determine their per-sonalities, and this limited treatment is crucial to the political alignment of the robots and humans. The film’s presentation of a robot protagonist who develops sentience, intelligence, and human characteristics, like many of its sci-fi precursors, raises ques-tions about the essence of the human and what the stakes are if a discernible human essence manifests in entities that are politically and ethically treated as other than or less than human.21 Central to the human essence presented in the film’s robots is a self-fashioning quality demonstrated by their deliberate choices, which is related to their directives possessing linguistic, metaphorical properties (an ontological lack) as well as programmatic structures. The presence of such an essence provides the politi-cal justification for apparent equal treatment of robots and humans in the society that emerges at the film’s end. The argument, in short, is that the robots manifest a dignity

18 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1992).

19 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 84–112.

20 See, e.g., Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

21 For example, Short Circuit (John Badham, 1986), The Matrix films (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999–2003), and the manga-inspired Ghost in the Shell (Maoru Oshii, 1995) anime.


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comprehensible to humans because a comparable essence exists beneath their material differences.22 This enables the robots and humans to work as equals to build a new society on Earth at the film’s conclusion. Animation has a central role in this posthuman thought experiment in that the illusion of life relies on external, visible markers to denote the invisible, ephemeral qualities of personality and vitality, and even more than live action, animation gener-ates lifelike movement through mechanical means. Like the early cinema and ani-mation productions that participated in representational efforts to reckon with the “human motor” industrial analogy, the teams of animators and technicians at Pixar can be credited with imagining and representing a kind of embodied, nonhuman life that emerges from computer programming.23 The Pixar studio, as its history attests, originated from computer culture more so than from animation and film production. Although influenced by the Disney animation tradition, the company initially pro-duced graphics computers, not movies.24 For many moviegoers, Pixar films have been an introduction to computer-generated, “hyperreal” animation, and as evinced by its technologically reflexive narratives, Pixar has thought about how to introduce people to this medium.25 From this location in popular media, Pixar films can be considered a primary means for audiences to acclimate to the technologies of today and the future, as cartoons, and the cinema more generally, were during the early twentieth century. This role of Pixar in the history of posthumanism and computer technology mani-fests, for instance, in the pop-bioethics blog of Kyle Munkittrick. Writing for Discover magazine, Munkittrick argues that Pixar films, through their personification of objects and animals in nonmagical worlds, are preparing us for the extension of “person-hood” to nonhumans, and therein, for the extension of individual rights to nonhu-mans.26 This notion accords with Halberstam’s reading of Dory from Finding Nemo as

22 This rationale insists that rights need to be based in essentials in order to defend against discrimination; for example, minorities need to share an essence with a privileged majority to deserve equal treatment. See Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2003).

23 Scott Bukatman, Poetics of Slumberland, 29–37; Rabinbach, Human Motor, 91–97.

24 I do not directly discuss here the extent to which Pixar has developed an animation tradition distinct from the Disney tradition, which arose to prominence in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and then reinvented itself in the late 1980s and 1990s. David Price’s biography of the company, however, details how many of the central figures of the Pixar brain trust had computer science backgrounds and experience in technology entrepreneurship. Fred Turner also mentions Pixar in his book documenting the history of cyberculture as it emerged out of counterculture movements, the Cold War, and the entrepreneurial culture of California. See David Price, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Com-pany (New York: Vintage Books, 2009); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 200–201.

25 Audiences were certainly exposed to computer animation before Pixar features through computer-generated imagery and through Pixar’s own television commercials, but, as audiences were aware, Toy Story marked a qualitative leap. Further, as David Price relates, “hyperreal” for Pixar artists refers to the stylized realism that feels real without being photorealistic. Like avoiding the “uncanny valley” of photorealistic animated humans, Pixar artists have learned how to stylize their animation for a pleasurable balance of realism and cartoon. For instance, the early animation for Finding Nemo’s underwater world was too realistic for test audiences. The conclusion was that talking fish were not palatable within such realism. See Price, Pixar Touch, 213. In regard to technologically reflexive narratives and in-troducing audiences to computer animation, see J. P. Telotte, Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 205.

26 Kyle Munkittrick, “The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films,” Science Not Fiction (blog), May 14, 2011, http://blogs .discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2011/05/14/the-hidden-message-in-pixars-films/#.Uw5GY3m1QpE.


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presenting an alternative form of selfhood. WALL-E supports this line of reasoning, as his character is an intelligent, sentient robot who restores liveliness to humans who have become numb and isolated in the midst of their techno-paradise. But such a reading de-emphasizes the traditional forms of desire and coupling already discussed, and it glosses over the lack of alterity between the robots and humans, whereas many sci-fi productions emphasize that alterity and the destruction it unleashes. For example, in “The Second Renaissance” of The Animatrix (Mahiro Maeda, 2003), the animated prequel to The Matrix, human-machine tensions escalate until the conscious machines are exiled from human society. They then form an economically superior city of their own, and a devastating war between humans and machines ensues. WALL-E avoids such a scenario altogether but remains engaged in the ongoing philosophical debate pitting hope in technological progress (WALL-E and the robots) against the fear that the human proclivity for technology is, in the final analysis, destructive. The destruc-tive threat in the film is not that the robots will declare war on the humans. Instead, the threat comes from the programmatic, conditioned behavior that afflicts the humans aboard the Axiom and threatens their capacity for action and intimacy. WALL-E, in fact, depicts a hyperbolic, cartoonish, futuristic version of the social ills that Sherry Turkle investigates. Turkle contends that social robots and networked me-dia have deleterious effects on human intimacy and sociability. She describes how the vulnerable and neglected populations of children and the elderly tend to be the first to experience the replacement of human relationships with robot relationships. Moti-vated by feelings of vulnerability, the fear of difference, the despair of loneliness, and the risks of interdependent and unreliable human relationships, many children and elderly persons disregard the artificiality of their robotic pets and interlocutors and treat them as if they were alive or human. Complementary to this robotic context, the networked culture supported by mobile telephony and the web generates fears of isolation and abandonment through its rendering of nearly ceaseless connectivity. Turkle argues that amid these social practices, “we settle for the inanimate,” and that behind the culture of networked media and robot companions lurks a desire for conve-nience and control that has led to the substitution of nonhuman experience for human experience.27 Crucial to Turkle’s argument is the as-if, fetishistic logic that facilitates human-machine interactions. In relation to the narrative of WALL-E, the human ca-pacity for fetishism evinced in Turkle’s work appears in both the humans’ quotidian media practices and their fondness for WALL-E the robot. WALL-E complicates the debate about the extent to which media support com-munal, interpersonal bonds by depicting both media habits that diminish intimacy and technology that becomes capable of intimacy itself. The prizing of intimacy and connectedness has been highly influential in the development of technology industries in the United States, and especially Silicon Valley.28 Key figures in the history of Pixar, such as Steve Jobs and Alvy Ray Smith, attest to the presence of a 1960s countercul-ture ethos that championed such values and contributed to the development of the

27 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 281.

28 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 248.


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animation studio.29 This optimism about the capability of information technology to foster community, intimacy, and democratic participation in society has found many supporters in popular culture as well as academia.30

However, what stifles intimacy in the film, and for Turkle, is not technology gener-ally but particular uses of and relations to machines. The infantilized, narcissistic hu-mans aboard the Axiom are bored, numb, and “alone together.” When WALL-E inad-vertently interrupts the routines of two humans, they instantly see their environment in a new way. Even though these moments of interruption occur separately (WALL-E knocks John off his deck chair and disconnects Mary’s personal media screen), the converted John and Mary eventually find each other and begin an intimate, meaning-ful friendship. The film and Turkle’s descriptions share the premise that a large part of human nature is about controlling the contingencies of life and managing fear. Hence, the Axiom is essentially a cruise ship on which all aspects of life are administered, and in Turkle’s analysis children and the elderly will opt for relationships that garner feelings of stability and safety.31 The upshot here is that the efforts to maintain control over life’s vagaries and to improve upon life’s disappointments contribute to an increas-ing perception of people as unreliable and unpredictable. In turn, people behave less empathetically toward one another and fail to form pleasurable bonds. When com-puter technology restricts spontaneity and unfamiliarity, programming refers to an internal, nonnegotiable structure as opposed to an external set of conditions open to manipulation. This usage of programming as a social metaphor for technical, determinative, im-mutable structures frequently describes processes of governance, discipline, and con-trol not unlike the administration on the Axiom. For instance, sociologist A. Aneesh defines programming schemes as the many institutions of governance—both private and public—that developed into the modern state, and he describes three general pro-gramming types: bureaucratic, panoptic, and “algocratic.”32 The algocratic scheme, or the rule of algorithms, has proliferated in recent decades along with information-based media and machines, and with a market-driven culture obsessed with calculated predictions and anticipating the future.33 The algocratic organization of society, or programming at large, introduces a level plane for the global integration of labor and capital, and it restructures economic and social practices according to the rules and limits of software used every day. There is a general diminution of negotiability under this algocratic regime, as when software applications used in the workplace limit and regiment an employee’s work practices, or when a surveillance camera rather than a police officer issues a citation for a traffic violation, or when tools such as Google

29 On Smith, see Price, Pixar Touch, 18–22; on Steve Jobs, see Price, Pixar Touch, 61–85.

30 See, e.g., Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995).

31 Turkle, Alone Together, 117, 221–222.

32 Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 22–23.

33 Aneesh refers to this as a general “war on surprise” (Virtual Migration, 23). See also Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).


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Search determine how we navigate the Internet.34 It is to this reality that life aboard the Axiom also refers. The totalizing presence of the corporation Buy-n-Large is noth-ing more than a constellation of computer programs resistant to change. The habits and social conditioning of the humans aboard the Axiom are a fine example of the feedback loops and dynamics that shape human-machine relations in that they show how closely visible practices are bound up with invisible program-ming. In WALL-E, the care of humanity has been delegated to Buy-n-Large, which has delegated that care to automated machines. This process is facilitated by humans’ desire for comfort and fear of chance, and by their capacity for fetishism, which is another way of saying that quite often humans do not demand or need an experience of reality free from illusion. But once again, this condition is both the problem and the solution. In the diegesis of the film, the human characters fully accept WALL-E and the other “rogue robots” as heroes and their equals. There is no presumption that the rather obvious differences in embodiment will present the sorts of conflict depicted in films such as The Animatrix. WALL-E presents a story about humans who have em-braced media and automation to the extent that they no longer have intimate human relationships, and then it is their robots who save them from this plight. This embrace of artificiality concurs with Turkle’s observations of people interacting with machines and media as if they were human, and with Aneesh’s observations of people working under the nonnegotiable algocratic regime. And even the more forward-looking argu-ments of Munkittrick and Halberstam find that Pixar films appreciate the capacity for humans to expand their notions of personhood to include modes of being that were once excluded from human life.

An Ontology of Computer Animation. There is more to say about this culture of programming and computer animation, since all new media objects are composed of code, which enables their mathematical description and algorithmic manipulation.35 This condition alters the position and practices of the animator within the animation industry, but the historical tension between controlled, precise labor and the lively, plasmatic, playful qualities of animation remain.36 Commensurate with the frontier spaces of modernization alluded to in the beginning of WALL-E, then, computer ani-mation explores the frontier of digital space and works to reconcile it with the practices of predigital animators and filmmakers. Rather than emphasizing the emancipatory aesthetics of animation or the controlled, precise production processes, I continue to argue in this section that computer animation demonstrates how closely human practices are bound up with the machines and tools of production. Further, computer animation is well suited to endorse arguments for considering the politics of things and for distributing responsibility across human and nonhuman agents. The narrative of WALL-E can be read as supportive of this theory of animation through its reflexivity

34 Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 117–120. See also Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything: And Why We Should Worry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

35 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 27.

36 Scott Bukatman writes, “Animation as an idea speaks to life, autonomy, movement, freedom, while animation as a mode of production speaks to division of labor, precision of control, abundances of preplanning, the preclusion of the random” (Poetics of Slumberland, 108; italics in original).


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as well as its conflation of desire and programming and its comparison of robots and humans. Although science fiction tends to offer audiences the opportunity to contemplate future technologies and the worlds that produce them, WALL-E, and Pixar films in general, carefully maintain a balance between the old and the new, which is significant considering the association of computer animation with advanced technologies.37 The expansion of digital media into cinema during the 1990s and early 2000s raised criti-cal awareness of animation history as arguments gained traction linking digital media to animation practices rather than live action.38 But animation practices changed as well through the restandardization of objects, movements, and perspectives, as well as new realism goals. Because the numerical and modular constitution of digital media enables seamless composition, the capacity for creating virtual or fictional spaces with moving images is greatly expanded.39 Media users navigate virtual spaces in gaming platforms, for instance, but in computer space the material representational limits are mathematical, not perceptual. Therefore, additional details and dimensions can be precisely calculated even if they are abstractly represented to human users. With this capability in mind, Lev Manovich describes the synthetic images of computer anima-tion as future-oriented:

We should not consider clean, skinless, too flexible, and at the same time too jerky, human figures in 3-D computer animation as unrealistic, as imperfect approximations to the real thing—our bodies. They are perfectly realistic representations of a cyborg body yet to come, of a world reduced to geom-etry, where efficient representation via a geometric model becomes the basis of reality. The synthetic image simply represents the future.40

Manovich ultimately compares the synthetic image to socialist realism: an idealized vision of the future integrated into an imperfect present.41 In this formulation, the ideal vision is facilitated by the precise, controlled, multidimensional cyborg practice of programming. But Pixar is not entirely future oriented, as the opening of WALL-E demonstrates. Pixar computer graphics experts learned early on that producing computer anima-tion that simulates cinematography is much easier than animation that pursues a real-ism based on human perception, which presents much more information. This means that the general goal of greater realism for those working in computer graphics in-dustries often amounts to translating the formal aesthetics of cinema into computer

37 Mihaela Mihailova argues compellingly that computer-generated images tend to be showcases for a studio’s techni-cal prowess, and that increasingly complex computer-animated worlds only enhance the fantasy of mastery that has pervaded the history of animation. Mihaela Mihailova, “The Mastery Machine: Digital Animation and Fantasies of Control,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 2 (2013): 131–148.

38 Manovich writes, “Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements,” and he adds, “Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation.” Language of New Media, 302.

39 Ibid., 30–31, 132–149, 155–160.

40 Ibid., 202–203.

41 Ibid., 203.


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programs.42 One of the innovative achievements of WALL-E was the development of virtual camera software that could simulate the camera perspective and imperfections that viewers would customarily find in 1970s classic science-fiction films.43 Further, Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter has developed and championed an aesthetic that roots innovation in the familiar, as demonstrated by his animated shorts about quotidian objects.44 Thus, familiar spaces complement the new innovations of the ani-mation medium, and the programmatic precision of computer graphics enables the creators at Pixar to develop a finely tuned balance. Certainly, contingency and surprise still find their way into the production process, but computer imaging has enhanced the invisible, totalizing control of the animators even as they collaborate from different parts of the world. The mix of old and new production practices accompanied by the mix of old and new aesthetics demonstrates the interconnectedness of production and product, which obviously includes mixed feelings as well. J. P. Telotte notes animators’ angst over being reduced to editors when they primarily use software to manipulate computer images, and Leon Gurevitch convincingly compares the production of computer ani-mation to commercial product design.45 Telotte’s history of animation is particularly useful because its framework emphasizes two spaces: that of the animator and that of the animation. The first is a space to create, and the second is a space for that creation to come to life. This framework informs his interpretation of technical innovations in animation. Through the multiplane camera, for instance, Disney animators struck a new balance between fantasy and reality as they approximated the appearance of live-action cinema.46 Similarly, Pixar’s computer animation represents new technology that has again recalibrated the balance between realism and fantasy. Telotte’s analysis of Pixar narratives, which he describes as having “technical self-consciousness,” illu-minates how they complement the studio’s exploration of depicting normal space and fantastic space. This is obvious in most Pixar films: in Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001), parallel human and monster worlds are separated by closet doors, and in The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004), the superhero characters must blend in with human society, but on the villain Syndrome’s island, the “Supers” are able to use their powers and demon-strate the medium’s capacity for fantasy.47 Telotte concludes his book by claiming that the spaces of animation have served a set of human efforts: “grappling with unfamiliar spaces, staking out a stable place from which to examine the unknown, constructing a human realm in a world of uncertainty, disappearance, and ‘reality effects.’”48 This last description of the world is grounded in the work of Paul Virilio and refers to a

42 Ibid., 190–192; Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, and Edwin Catmull, “The Reyes Image Rendering Architecture,” Computer Graphics 21, no. 4 (1987): 95–102.

43 Price, Pixar Touch, 264.

44 Ibid., 263.

45 Telotte, Animating Space, 225; Leon Gurevitch, “Computer Generated Animation as Product Design Engineered Culture, or Buzz Lightyear to the Sales Floor, to the Checkout and Beyond!,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7, no. 2 (2012): 131–149.

46 Telotte, Animating Space, 134–135.

47 Ibid., 203–221.

48 Ibid., 256.


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media-saturated condition full of copies and simulacra but devoid of originals, one in which time and space have been flattened.49 Telotte reads WALL-E in particular as an effort to restore depth and dimensionality to this condition, but more interesting is his description of the contact between the space of production and the space of represen-tation, which echoes the frontier ethos of space exploration present in WALL-E. The language about “grappling” with unfamiliarity, “staking out” stability, and “construct-ing” humanity suggests a close proximity to the nonhuman and a physical effort to establish autonomy within a zone of contact. As already described, contact between humans and machines is significant in WALL-E, but it produces mutual recognition rather than dominance. In the narrative, the programs and directives presumably created by humans are no longer managed by humans, but given enough time, unscripted and unpredictable phenomena emerge. Captain B. McCrea is the only human character depicted in an authoritative posi-tion over the ship’s technologies, and it is he who must physically battle with Auto to retake control of the ship.50 The recovery of the Axiom, however, would not have been successful without the assistance of the rogue robots, WALL-E, and EVE. Again, the film presents us with a contradictory formulation: the humans regain their autonomy and authority over their technology, and simultaneously, their technology evolves into equally personified beings. This narrative correlates with animation’s fundamental tension between the space of creative control and the space in which creations appear as free agents, and it offers a resolution to that zone of contact described by Telotte.51

This story can be read as masking the ideological and material control of the hu-mans involved in the film’s production, but it can also be read as an allegory about the human presumption of control that obfuscates the agency of technical media(tors). Bruno Latour consistently argues that our tools, instruments, communication devices, and any of the technologies we interact with are not mere extensions of ourselves but are important participants in generating selfhood, action, and agency. For La-tour, agency is distributed through networks of actants, both nonhuman and human, and this reconfiguration of action challenges notions of political authority and or-ganization. Latour writes, “In the realm of techniques, no one is in command—not because technology is in command, but because, truly, no one, and nothing at all, is in command.”52 The point here is that the teams of animators, technicians, directors, and writers at Pixar share creative authority with the technical mediators at their dis-posal, from hardware to the software applications that they use and create, even if they

49 Paul Virilio, Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).

50 Appropriately, this scene depicts Captain McCrea relearning to walk, which is set to Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), as featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

51 This claim about animation’s capacity for control and for the depiction of autonomous life is not unrelated to claims about live-action cinema’s capacity to represent the motion, time, and space of life through an apparatus of techni-cal control. For a discussion of how narrative emerged in cinema as a controlling force to hedge the contingency of live recording, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). For a discussion of how cinema has always featured the controlled aspects of composition, construction, and visual effects, see Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011).

52 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 298 (italics in original).


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do not acknowledge the agential work of those tools. WALL-E’s resolution resembles Latour’s politics through its portrayal of robot-human cooperation and equal treat-ment, which is enhanced by the illusion-of-life cartooning of machines with a human essence. The resurgence of animation as a popular medium at the end of the twen-tieth century ought to encourage examination of the politics of things and technical devices, because computer animation, with its illusion of control and illusion of life, expresses both ontological hierarchy and ontological parity.53

Playing with Alien Nature. This final section considers the film’s inclusion of live action and its references to a history of representational media in which animation figures prominently. Relating these components to Walter Benjamin’s work on media history and changes in human perception during the early twentieth century clarifies how computer animation relates to hand-drawn animation and builds on the legacy of playing with perceptions of naturalness that Benjamin observed in cinema and early animation. Examining Benjamin’s formulation of play in opposition to semblance and the perception-altering work of cinema illuminates how WALL-E presents new emer-gences in a related series. Akin to the opening sequence that threads together allusions to the spatial frontiers of the 1890s, 1960s, and 2000s, the allusions to period-specific media relate unique representations to mechanically reproducible representations to digital representations—and the play each brings into human perception and ideas of naturalness. In short, this section argues that computer animation presents nature in a state of play through its alien presentation of life. While this intriguing property of animation contributes to the history of media presented in WALL-E and seemingly destabilizes categories of nature, a notion that Pixar narratives tend to champion, it also enhances the medium’s capacity to naturalize particular cultural practices such as the liberal desire and heterosexuality already discussed.54

In respect to the history of representational media, WALL-E’s interaction with the film Hello, Dolly! presents a general reversal of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which details how technical reproducibility altered the definition and function of art, shifting the value of art objects from ritual, cult value to exhibition value.55 Instead of the decay of aura associated with modernity, WALL-E situates Hello Dolly! in a context in which its value is ritualistic—as far as anyone knows, the character WALL-E has the only tape of the film (an impossible copy since no VHS tape could last seven hundred years). Its reproducibility serves only WALL-E, and it becomes a sacred prism through which he gains insight into an ancient human world. For WALL-E, Hello, Dolly! has a powerful aura through its uniqueness, but through his playful engagement with it, WALL-E

53 Bob Mondello, “Looking for the Megabucks? Think Megapixels,” NPR.org, July 13, 2012, http://www.npr .org/2012/07/13/156487109/looking-for-the-megabucks-think-megapixels.

54 This reading of the Pixar oeuvre is supported by Munkittrick’s argument about new forms of personhood and Halber-stam’s use of Pixarvolt to designate animated films that resist sociocultural norms, and it is further exemplified in my analysis of Ratatouille (Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava, 2007). See Eric Herhuth, “Cooking Like a Rat: Sensation and Politics in Disney-Pixar’s Ratatouille,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31, no. 5 (forthcoming).

55 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 217–252.


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appears absorbed by the film and appears to absorb humanity through the film.56 This supports the film’s technical reflexivity in that WALL-E’s cinematic preparation for intimacy with another entity parallels the argument that Pixar films are preparing people for new forms of personhood. WALL-E is exposed to the gaze of the camera in Hello, Dolly!, along with its depictions of heterosexual coupling, and the virtual space of video presents him with new relational possibilities that he ultimately tries to fulfill with EVE. Likewise, a new relationship between humans and machines and Earth develops within the world of the film. The major difference here, however, is that in the latter, the future is animated, whereas the past, as recorded in Hello, Dolly!, is live action. All recordings from the ancient, human world, such as those of Buy-n-Large’s chief executive officer Shelby Forthright (Fred Willard), that appear within the diegesis of the film are presented through live action. WALL-E is the first Pixar film to include live action, and by staging the future as animated and the past as live, the film combines the nostalgia for aura with a similar nostalgia for an indexical, human past. The fleshy look of human actors and the grainy appearance of old videotape do not fit the sleek, perfectly designed appearance of computer animation, which effectively renders live action as an uncanny, antiquated phenomenon. The film’s concluding credits, which follow the Axiom’s return to Earth, reference this human past but depict a new begin-ning in which robots and humans develop an agrarian society, followed by urban life. The animation of this sequence imitates aesthetic movements within art history (e.g., from the friezes of ancient Egypt to impressionist painting). The obvious remediation conveyed through this sequence reinforces the film’s trope of emergence, relates it to a history of representational media, and implies that computer animation is another significant medium to emerge in this history.57 Live-action cinema remains an impor-tant influence, but it is presented as a rare, momentary phenomenon. Akin to Lev Manovich’s contention that cinema is a particular moment within a longer history of animation, in WALL-E it is animation that integrates the past and present, combining old forms with the new, utopian robot-human community.58

Benjamin’s work on cinema and perception remains useful in this context inso-far as his comments on animation assist in delineating the aesthetic components that contribute to this integration of the past and present. As Miriam Hansen describes, play is a critical concept within Benjamin’s understanding of cinema. First, it is part of a historically polar relation with semblance: semblance referring to the thing rep-resented and play referring to the thing doing the representing (playing). Benjamin’s claim is that this form of play is greatest in film since semblance diminishes along with the decay of aura.59 Further, Benjamin notes in the second version of his “Work of Art” essay that while second technology, or that which reduces the work of humans

56 Here I am proposing that WALL-E demonstrates both distraction and concentration in respect to Benjamin’s distinc-tion. WALL-E concentrates on the film as he views it alone, but in his ability to view it repeatedly and take the music with him, he also engages it in a distracted manner. See Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 239.

57 Remediation refers to the representation of one medium within another. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

58 Manovich, Language of New Media, 302.

59 Miriam Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema” (Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2003), Cana-dian Journal of Film Studies 13, no. 1 (2004): 9–10.


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through delegation, works by endless variations and experiments, its origin lies in play, or the idea that multiple iterations will eventually produce something new.60 Cinema for Benjamin, as second technology, does not pursue mastery over nature but seeks an “interplay between nature and humanity,” and it presents to audiences their own tech-nologically reorganized, alienated selves.61 For Benjamin, this “interplay between na-ture and humanity” was exemplified in the early Mickey Mouse films: “In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.”62 By distorting the physical rules of nature (e.g., an anthropomorphic mouse and music emanating from inanimate ob-jects as in Steamboat Willie [Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1928]), early Disney anima-tion provided a collective “dream” experience. The audience could laugh together and experience the wonderment of animation in a therapeutic, cathartic mode. In this way Mickey Mouse provided audiences with a mechanized, hybridized character relevant to the modern world—similar to Chaplin’s performances, which inspired the character WALL-E. But for Benjamin, as Hansen notes as well, the anthropomorphic, graphic character is a critical component: “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.”63 And yet Benjamin claims that these films were popular because “the public recognizes its own life in them.”64 This description of Mickey Mouse, which fosters recognition without resemblance, approaches the aesthetics of the new melded with the familiar that have been espoused by John Lasseter, but it does not account for the material differences be-tween early Mickey Mouse and the Pixar characters. Certainly, a space of play persists in Pixar’s animation, but it must be a space fundamentally different from that of early Disney animation. Esther Leslie’s work on animation and critical theory can help with the compari-son at hand; when explicating Benjamin’s writing on the subject of animation, she reminds us that the section titled “Mickey Mouse” in the first version of the “Work of Art” essay contains Benjamin’s explanation of the “optical unconscious.”65 This concept describes the capability of the camera to record the world and present it to a human audience in a modified or enhanced fashion—comparable to a microscope that enables the human eye to perceive the world in greater detail. Leslie writes, “The

60 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 26. The “Work of Art” essay that appears in Illuminations is the third version of the essay. For a discussion of all three versions of the essay, see Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California, 2012).

61 Contrary to first technology, which refers to magical practices and rituals that strived to give humans mastery over nature, second technology expands playful spaces for humans while diminishing aura. See Benjamin’s “Work of Art: Second Version,” 26; Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 11–13.

62 Walter Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 338.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, 104–105.


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technological nature that bares itself to the camera implies an altered nature. This na-ture encompasses not only the creaturely and physical but also the man-made and the historical.”66 Once again, in this discussion of the optical unconscious, there is an “in-terplay between nature and humanity.” But the nature bared before the camera, if ap-plicable to Mickey Mouse and animation as well, must not be the filmed nature that we describe as indexical. Instead, it is a nature that cannot be directly pointed to, hence its comparison to the unconscious. The notion of the optical unconscious, then, is not exclusive to indexical media but applies generally to experiences with representations that are recognizably inspired by or related to naturally occurring phenomena, though without much resemblance to human perceptions of naturally occurring phenomena. I refer to such media forms as presenting an alien nature, which can be more effec-tively conveyed through visual effects than through realistic, live-action recording.67

Lev Manovich, when comparing the work of Walter Benjamin to that of Paul Virilio, illuminates this point about alien nature more fully:

Writing in 1936, Benjamin uses the real landscape and a painting as exam-ples of what is natural for human perception. This natural state is invaded by film, which collapses distances, bringing everything equally close, and de-stroys aura. Virilio, writing half a century later, draws the lines quite differ-ently. If for Benjamin film still represents an alien presence, for Virilio it has already become part of our human nature, the continuation of our natural sight. Virilio considers human vision, the Renaissance perspective, painting, and film as all belonging to the Small Optics of geometric perspective, in contrast to the Big Optics of instant electronic transmission.68

Manovich uses this passage to explain how modernization consistently involves dis-ruptions of space, and “big optics” are no exception, as they render any spatial point equally accessible to any other. The passage also shows how the category of the “natu-ral” has changed from Benjamin to Virilio along with innovations in media technolo-gies, of which computer animation is another. Influenced by Virilio’s position about the loss of space or depth, Telotte reads computer animation, particularly Pixar, as a countermeasure to the flatness of postmodern life. In the terms of the Virilio-Benjamin comparison, computer animation reopens “small optics” by realienating the natu-ral space of cinema. In other words, through computer animation, cinematic space, which in live action has always been a three-dimensional space, gains more of the optical unconscious attributes appreciated by Benjamin.69 With its digital composi-tion and presentation of space, computer animation offers an alien nature that differs from the hand-drawn animation of classical Disney but shares the optical unconscious

66 Ibid., 106.

67 Alien nature is certainly comparable to the concept of the uncanny, which is a common descriptor of animation. However, an important distinction is that alien nature jettisons the psychoanalytical notion that the uncanny refers to an experience of the return of the repressed. Alien nature refers more to the relation of human perception and environment, and it should invoke a continuum of experience as alien things are familiarized and familiar things are defamiliarized.

68 Manovich, Language of New Media, 173.

69 Prince, Digital Visual Effects, 206.


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virtues of rendering the invisible visible, and as Benjamin’s comments about Mickey Mouse relate, of challenging hierarchies dependent on presumptions about a stable category of nature. Similar to Manovich’s contention that the synthetic image is a future-oriented, cyborg image, the point here is that computer animation has the effect of throwing nature once again into a state of play. Virilio’s assumption that cinema, as belonging to small optics, has been naturalized is revised by computer animation. The narrative of WALL-E correlates with this notion of nature in a state of play, in that it depicts the emergence and naturalization of robot life along with the reconnection of past and present through representational media. Through WALL-E’s auratic yet playful relationship with Hello, Dolly! and the nostalgic treatment of live-action clips, computer animation, as a new medium, is directly compared and related to live-action cinema in terms of play rather than semblance. That is, there is an emphasis on the technicity of these media and how that affects human perception and ideas of nature. Beyond WALL-E, Pixar’s narratives in general suggest that computer animation continues a tradition of animation that encourages aesthetic innovation and recon-figurations of naturalness. Accompanying the alien nature of animation aesthetics, Pixar characters express ontological crises that demand reconfiguring what is natural: whether it is Buzz Lightyear learning that he is a toy, superhumans trying to fit into an average society, or robots becoming alive in a human fashion. This context echoes the effects of modernization, where aesthetic innovations interact with, follow, and influ-ence technical innovations, and where human subjectivities and identities are likewise shaped by such developments.70 Such a state, in which representations are produced in and transposed into a coded, computer medium while remaining recognizable and in-telligible, reconfigures screen-based aesthetic experience. The play offered here is not that of live action, which has greater elements of contingency built into its assemblage of cameras, people, and staging, nor precisely that of hand-drawn animation; rather, the play facilitated by computer animation emerges through new forms of technical mediation and delegation. But just as Benjamin was overly optimistic about the potential of cinema to provide alternatives to the masses being organized by industrial life and fascist politics, claims like Munkittrick’s, that Pixar is ushering us toward expanded rights and personhood, are equally overstated. The space of play offered by computer animation corresponds with the expanse of ludic practices across technology industries; and akin to the cre-ativity divide in gaming, in which the creative capacity of a gamer is fundamentally different from that of game designers, the playful experience of watching computer animation differs significantly from the experiences of the animators.71 This sort of class divide can be read into WALL-E since there are no programmers anywhere in the film, but the dream of autonomy and self-fashioning emerges through those who are programmed. The absence of programmers also supports a Latourian reading in which there is no object, human or nonhuman, that is not subject to some kind of del-egation or directive. Even the creative classes have their ideologies, which means their

70 Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 10–35, 131–210.

71 Thomas Malaby, “Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 213–216.


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control over the incredibly playful space of computer animation should not be taken lightly. In conclusion, although the aesthetics of computer animation maintain a kind of alien nature experience that revitalizes the playful quality of animation and cinema, this does not prevent the naturalization and perpetuation of cultural practices from occurring within the narrative. It may even facilitate this process, because in a world where nature is in flux and disfigured, that which remains natural may become all the more permanent. In WALL-E, an abstract, liberal desire emerges by chance and gains essentialist status, which places the robots in a paradoxical but equal position with the consumerist, infantile humans. The idea here is that once the programmatic directives are removed or loosened, a genuine nature emerges, and in that instance, heterosexu-ality develops without its cultural accoutrements. The narrative of WALL-E, as met-onymically related to computer animation, places nature in a state of play while simul-taneously demonstrating creative control through the emergence of familiar norms and values. The emergence of these norms in the empty, playful space of the film (both Earth and outer space) is compounded by the playful space of animation itself. The space of computer animation, as represented in the particular case of WALL-E, poses as free for the essence of technology and the human to emerge, but it simultane-ously functions as a space for precise control, or algocratic programming. ✽

I thank Keith M. Johnston and Patrice Petro for their critical reading of and keen suggestions on various drafts of this article.

Life, Love, and Programming: the Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer Animation

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