I have bad news to share with you if you think movies were never political.
Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment."
The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
Think about it. In real life, skin color doesn’t do… anything. It’s just a stupid way humans distinguish between each other.
Elemental - the two “races” can literally annihilate each other on contact. It would be like if we had humans made from matter and antimatter. “Racism” in such a world is completely justified and a matter of survival - what message does that send if you are meant to read it as a racial allegory? It makes no sense.
> The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels.
They lived on the back of a creature that was dying as a result of an infection and they had unknowingly been using the result of the infection as their power source. It's exactly the same kind of parallel and solution in fantastic terms. Stripped down these movies have a very similar storyline and message (things are broken, we can't just fix it without transforming ourselves, and some force or people will oppose that transformation).
Now, I prefer Wall-E. I think the cinematics are better. The emptiness and stillness of Earth, the serenity of space, the scene where the spacecraft docks with the Aurora and is cleaned. Films of that era and before gave you some breathing space with the spectacle without so much shit going on constantly. That said, I think if Strange World came out at the time Wall-E did instead of it then it would have been better received, I personally feel like I'm pretty tired of the style.
I do not think overt messaging was the main reason Strange World flopped (although it probably was the case for Turning Red), but rather, the general gross-ness of the character designs, along with the dull premise.
What overt messaging was in Turning Red? In any event, the reason that one flopped in theaters was that it also released simultaneously on Disney+, where AFAIK it has been very popular.
I am not sure I would take popularity on the streaming service as a sign of financial success, given something like Encanto was big in both the box offices and after the fact streaming, but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days.
I think you'd have to work kinda hard to justify that reading—and while believe you that you can, I do wonder why you'd want to work so hard to make such a reading?
> Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
> but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days
Agreed.
Even later on, the movie concludes with this confident thirteen year old girl declaring that she has a right to twerk, all while she hopes to end up backstage with her friends at the local boy band concert. What typically happens to underage girls backstage at concerts? I wonder.
I did very little reading into the events the story presents to get to this conclusion. Turning Red is not very subtle at all. It shouts in your face about pads and how twerking is the bomb.
>Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
To the extent that any parents today care about what their kids watch, instead of shrugging while letting their toddlers gormlessly stare at a youtube video pipeline of strangely pornographic spiderman and elsa videos, they typically care about explicit violence, references to sex, and references to drugs. Turning Red has very clear cut examples of two of these things. I cannot imagine most parents being comfortable about discussing pads with their five or six year old daughters, nor thinking that the world is a better place when those daughters decide they want to start twerking as well because they saw it in the movie.
On the other hand there is a majority consensus that littering and waste is bad and we have a responsibility to protect the Earth from it. This is different from climate change which is another issue with little majority consensus.
It's not about presentation, but the underlying issues themselves.
How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
A. This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with,
B. Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. One fart joke is not a fart jokes movie.
C. The politics were never so explicitly partisan but just general themes such as the stupidity of being racist or being against teamwork - not jokes about widely-controversial modern issues.
No, though, falsely claiming something is political in a way (other than the specific political viewpoint) other things are not is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to attack politics you disagree with while avoiding the meat of the disagreement.
> Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie.
True, but irrelevant. Politics as the core is not any more common on any consistent-but-not-viewpoint-biased definition of “politics”. The common issue in complaints is status-quo bias.
> The politics were never so explicitly partisan
That’s somewhat true, in that for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1990s) the US was in an abnormally long political realignment, where the most highly salient political issues were not as clearly partisan