Pixar Misses the Point

I've always been a big fan of Pixar pictures and as I wrote this past summer, liked WallE for the reasons you might expect. An animated movie from one of the best studios going, about a trash machine that is cleaning up the planet after humans have trashed it due to unchecked wasteful practices. Sign me up.

So I was quite dismayed when I visited a friend down the street the other day and found what had come in their Los Angeles Times that day. A 10 oz, glossy printed, beautifully bound, 12" x 9 1/2" booklet on the movie. You see here in Los Angeles, Oscar fever is already starting and apparently the folks at Pixar wanted all of the voting members of the Academy to think of WallE. And what better way than to send them to all 815,723 subscribers (I'm guessing here but if the neighbors and several other non voting, non industry folks got them, I'm assuming a lot more did).

What an incredible waste. A waste of resources (paper, ink, time) and a waste of energy (to print them and then to deliver the extra weight). But it doesn't stop there.

WallE was all about how we as a planet need to shape up and start wasting less, start living a little cleaner, dare I say, more sustainably. So I opened it up hoping to find tips on how to waste less, conserve more, recycle, repurpose, you name it. Instead I found quotes from the top film critics on how great the movie was, and truly beautiful images from the film itself. The only thing remotely environmental was on the bottom left corner of the back cover of the entire thing.

Amazing. Amazing and sad all at the same time. Pixar, I give you an A plus for the message behind the movie, but a D (I'm being generous) on not recognizing that the message should apply to us all.

Dave