THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
in computer-animated movies, political subversion reaches to infinity and beyond.
By Stephen Shupe, Jayplay senior writer
Courtesy of www.moderntimes.com
The Hollywood Ten were accused of saturating movies with Communist Propaganda.
journalists who refused to confess membership in the Communist Party. Each was convicted of contempt and served up to a year in prison.
Robots
In Robots, a computer-animated tale of mechanical wonders from the creators of Ice Age, a cadre of broken-down machines leads a revolt to overthrow an evil arch-capitalist. The shiny metal rebels, including the heroic Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) and the trash-talking Fender (Robin Williams), live on the bottom rung of Robot City, picking up spare parts and barely scraping by. The machines unite and rise up against the oppressive Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), whose plan to sell a new generation of upgrades involves killing off all the old robots.
The most radical work
Rebels overthrowing a capitalist despot — sounds like socialism to me.
In fact, Robots isn't the first computer animation feature to espouse social ideals, if the House on Un-American Activities Committee ever re-emerges, such radicals as Buzz Lightyear and Rodney Copperbottom will surely be called to testify.
As HUAC and the Hollywood Ten so painfully illustrated in the late '40s and '50s, movies and politics have always had an enduring influence. The early 1960s were left-learning screenwriters and former
to come out of the Hollywood Ten was probably Dalton Trumbo's novel *Johnny Got His Gun*. In the book, a private gets all of his limbs shoved through the window and plays as a monument to the horrors of combat.
Trumbo's movies (A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo) were populist, socially conscious, mainstream entertainments completely devoid of overt propaganda. The ideas grew out of story and character, which is true of all of the great political films, from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate.
In Toy Story, the cinematic birthplace of computer animation features, a child's toys have the ability to spring to life. The toy box literally will not hold them. These playthings, including a reliable old cowboy named Woody (Tom Hanks) and an intergalactic upstart named Buzz Lightyear (Tum Allen), live as an extended family, as if transported from a '60s hipy commune. Freedom and self-determination as commodities make them a direct threat to the free-market system.
Such subversive ideas must have escaped the mind of Hanks, who's always been an outspoken critic of the "bad science" of socialist economics. For an altogether politically different take on freethinking toys, see Jee Dante's fun but fascistic Small Soldiers.
Three years after Toy Story, Dreamworks released Antz, the mother of all computer-animated socialist films. Z (Woody Allen) is a comically self-effacing worker ant stricken with a woman-size case of neuroses. He wants a life beyond slave labor for himself and his coworkers, embodied in his search for a mythical promised land known as Insectopia. In the army, Z bfriends Barbatus (Danny Glover), a weary foot soldier, who gets deCAPITATED in a devastating battle sequence. Barbatus' sudden, senseless death is a powerful anti-war statement worthy of Johnny Got His Gun.
Z inspires his fellow worker ants to rebel against the tyrannical General Mandible (Gene Hackman), ending in a revolution. In the course of this transformation he become synonymous with socialist ideals.
While Robots, Toy Story and Antz share political sensibilities, they mostly stand apart from other computer animation features. Two are downright pro-capitalist: Monsters Inc., which depicts the humanization of a giant corporation, and A Shark Tale, whose underwater frames are painted with indiscrete corporate advertisements.
Robots is now playing at South Wing 12. The Theatre St. Toy Story and Amex are available on DVD.
Toy Story II
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