document_title: WALL-E

question_text: what is the name of the company in wall-e

question_tokens: what is the name of the company in wall-e

text: WALL-E

text: Plot[edit]

text: In 2805, Earth is an abandoned planet covered in trash, with its people evacuated by megacorporation Buy-N-Large on giant starliners. BnL has left behind WALL-E robot trash compactors to clean up; however, all have since stopped functioning, except one unit who has gained sentience and is able to stay active using parts from other units. One day, WALL-E discovers a healthy seedling, which he returns to his home. Later, an unmanned spaceship lands and deploys an EVE probe to scan the planet. WALL-E is infatuated with EVE, who is initially hostile but gradually befriends him. When WALL-E brings EVE to his trailer and shows her the plant, however, she suddenly takes the plant and goes into standby mode. WALL-E, confused, unsuccessfully tries to reactivate her. The ship then returns to collect EVE, and with WALL-E clinging on, returns to its mothership, the starliner Axiom.

text: The Axiom's passengers have become obese and feeble due to microgravity and reliance on an automated lifestyle, including the ship's current captain, McCrea, who leaves the ship under the control of the robotic autopilot, AUTO. EVE is taken to the bridge, with WALL-E tagging along. McCrea is unprepared for a positive probe response, but learns that placing EVE's plant in the ship's Holo-Detector for verification will trigger a hyperjump back to Earth so humanity can recolonize it. However, AUTO orders his robotic assistant GO-4 to steal the plant to prevent this from happening.

text: With the plant missing, EVE is deemed faulty and taken to Diagnostics. WALL-E mistakes the procedure as torture, and in intervening accidentally frees a group of malfunctioning robots and causes both EVE and himself to be designated as rogue. Frustrated, EVE takes WALL-E to an escape pod to send him home, but they are interrupted when GO-4 arrives with the plant, placing it in a pod set to self-destruct, which WALL-E enters just before it is jettisoned. WALL-E escapes, saving the plant, and he and EVE reconcile and celebrate with a dance in space around the Axiom.

text: EVE brings the plant back to McCrea, who watches EVE's recordings of Earth and concludes that they must return. However, AUTO refuses, revealing his own secret no-return directive A113, issued to BnL autopilots after the corporation concluded years earlier that the planet could not be saved. He mutinies, tasering WALL-E and deactivating EVE and throwing them both down the garbage chute, then detaining McCrea. EVE automatically reactivates and helps WALL-E bring the plant to the ship's Holo-Detector chamber; AUTO tries to close the chamber, crushing WALL-E when he struggles to keep it open, but McCrea is able to deactivate him and destroy GO-4, while EVE inserts the plant to activate the hyperjump.

text: Having arrived back on Earth, EVE repairs and reactivates WALL-E, but finds that his memory has been reset and his personality is gone. Heartbroken, EVE gives WALL-E a farewell kiss, which sparks his memory back to life and restores his original personality. WALL-E and EVE reunite as the humans and robots of the Axiom begin to restore Earth and its environment.

text: Cast[edit]

text:
Ben Burtt as WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class),[8] the title character. WALL-E, a robot who has developed sentience, and is the only robot of his kind shown to be still functioning on Earth. He is a small mobile compactor box with all-terrain treads, three-fingered shovel hands, binocular eyes, and retractable solar cells for power. Although working diligently to fulfill his directive to clean up the garbage (all the while accompanied by his cockroach friend Hal and music playing from his on-board recorder) he is distracted by his curiosity, collecting trinkets of interest. He stores and displays these "treasures" such as a birdcage full of rubber ducks, a Rubik's Cube, Zippos, disposable cups filled with plastic cutlery and a golden trophy at his home where he examines and categorizes his finds while watching a video cassette of Hello, Dolly! via an iPod viewed through a large Fresnel lens.
Elissa Knight as EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator),[8] a sleek robot probe whose directive is to locate vegetation on Earth and verify habitability. She has a glossy white egg-shaped body and blue LED eyes. She moves using antigravity technology and is equipped with scanners, specimen storage and a "quasar ion cannon" in her arm, which she is quick to use.
Jeff Garlin as Captain B. McCrea, the commanding pilot of the Axiom. His duties as captain are daily routines, with the ship's autopilot handling all true command functions.
Fred Willard as Shelby Forthright, the historical CEO of the Buy n Large Corporation, shown only in videos recorded around the time of the Axiom's initial launch. Constantly optimistic, Forthright proposed the evacuation plans, then to clean up and recolonize the planet. However, the corporation gave up after realizing how toxic Earth had become. Forthright is the one of the few live action characters with a speaking role, the first in any Pixar film.
John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy as John and Mary, respectively. John and Mary both live on the Axiom and are so dependent on their personal video screens and automatic services that they are oblivious to their surroundings, for instance not noticing that the ship features a giant swimming pool. However, they are brought out of their trances after separate encounters with WALL-E, eventually meeting face-to-face for the first time.
Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the Axiom's computer. Stanton joked about the role with Weaver, saying, "You realize you get to be 'Mother' now?"[9][10] referring to the name of the ship's computer in the film Alien, which also starred Weaver.[10]
MacInTalk, the text-to-speech program for the Apple Macintosh computers, was used for the voice of AUTO, the rogue artificial intelligence autopilot built into the ship. Unlike other robots in the film, AUTO is not influenced by WALL-E, but instead follows directive A113, which is to prevent the Axiom and the humans from returning to Earth because of the toxicity, and it works to prevent anyone from deviating from it.

Burtt and MacInTalk are also credited for the voice of M-O, as well as most of the other robots. M-O is a tiny, obsessively clean maintenance cleanerbot with rollers for arms who keeps the Axiom clean.

tag: ul

text: Production[edit]

text: Writing[edit]

text:
BACK ON M-O AND WALLY [sic]
M-O just finishes cleaning the floor.
Wally is fascinated.
Impishly makes another mark.
M-O compulsively cleans it. Can't resist.
M-O (bleeps): [Look, it stays clean. You got that?]
Wally wipes the bottom of his tread on M-O's face.
M-O loses it.
Scrubs his own face.

Stanton wrote the screenplay to focus on the visuals
and as a guide to what the sound effects needed to convey[11]

tag: div

text: Andrew Stanton conceived WALL-E during a lunch with fellow writers John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft in 1994. Toy Story was near completion and the writers brainstormed ideas for their next projects—A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo—at this lunch. Stanton asked, "What if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?"[9] Having struggled for many years with making the characters in Toy Story appealing, Stanton found his simple Robinson Crusoe-esque idea of a lonely robot on a deserted planet strong.[12][13] Stanton made WALL-E a waste collector as the idea was instantly understandable, and because it was a low-status menial job that made him sympathetic.[14] Stanton also liked the imagery of stacked cubes of garbage.[15] He did not find the idea dark because having a planet covered in garbage was for him a childish imagining of disaster.[16]

text: Stanton and Pete Docter developed the film under the title of Trash Planet for two months in 1995, but they did not know how to develop the story and Docter chose to direct Monsters, Inc. instead.[17][18] Stanton came up with the idea of WALL-E finding a plant, because his life as the sole inhabitant on a deserted world reminded Stanton of a plant growing among pavements.[19] Before they turned their attention to other projects, Stanton and Lasseter thought about having WALL-E fall in love, as it was the necessary progression away from loneliness.[16] Stanton started writing WALL-E again in 2002 while completing Finding Nemo.[20] Stanton formatted his script in a manner reminiscent of Dan O'Bannon's Alien. O'Bannon wrote his script in a manner Stanton found reminded him of haiku, where visual descriptions were done in continuous lines of a few words. Stanton wrote his robot dialogue conventionally, but placed them in brackets.[13] In late 2003, Stanton and a few others created a story reel of the first twenty minutes of the film. Lasseter and Steve Jobs were impressed and officially began development,[21] though Jobs stated he did not like the title, originally spelled "W.A.L.-E."[22]

text: While the first act of WALL-E "fell out of the sky" for Stanton,[16] he had originally wanted aliens to plant EVE to explore Earth and the rest of the film was different. When WALL-E comes to the Axiom, he incites a Spartacus-style rebellion by the robots against the remnants of the human race, which were cruel alien Gels (completely devolved, gelatinous, boneless, legless, see-through, green creatures that resemble Jell-O). James Hicks, a physiologist, mentioned to Stanton the concept of atrophy and the effects prolonged weightlessness would have on humans living in space for an inordinately extended time period.[9][23][24] Therefore, this was the inspiration of the humans degenerating into the alien Gels,[25] and their ancestry would have been revealed in a Planet of the Apes-style ending.[26] The Gels also spoke a made-up gibberish language, but Stanton scrapped this idea because he thought it would be too complicated for the audience to understand and they could easily be driven off from the storyline.[27] The Gels had a royal family, who host a dance in a castle on a lake in the back of the ship, and the Axiom curled up into a ball when returning to Earth in this incarnation of the story.[27] Stanton decided this was too bizarre and unengaging, and conceived humanity as "big babies".[26] Stanton developed the metaphorical theme of the humans learning to stand again and "grow[ing] up",[26][28] wanting WALL-E and EVE's relationship to inspire humanity because he felt few films explore how utopian societies come to exist.[29] The process of depicting the descendants of humanity as the way they appear in the movie was slow. Stanton first decided to put a nose and ears on the Gels so the audience could recognize them. Eventually, fingers, legs, clothes, and other characteristics were added until they arrived at the concept of being fetus-like to allow the audience to see themselves in the characters.[27]

text: In a later version of the film, Auto comes to the docking bay to retrieve EVE's plant. The film would have its first cutaway to the captain, but Stanton moved that as he found it too early to begin moving away from WALL-E's point-of-view. As an homage to Get Smart,[30] Auto takes the plant and goes into the bowels of the ship into a room resembling a brain where he watches videos of Buy n Large's scheme to clean up the Earth falling apart through the years. Stanton removed this to keep some mystery as to why the plant is taken from EVE. The captain appears to be unintelligent, but Stanton wanted him to just be unchallenged; otherwise he would have been unempathetic.[25] One example of how unintelligent the captain was depicted initially is that he was seen to wear his hat upside-down, only to fix it before he challenges Auto. In the finished film, he merely wears it casually atop his head, tightening it when he assumes real command of the Axiom.[27]

text: Originally, EVE would have been electrocuted by Auto, and then be quickly saved from ejection at the hands of the WALL-A robots by WALL-E. He would have then revived her by replacing her power unit with a cigarette lighter he brought from Earth. Stanton reversed this following a 2007 test screening, as he wanted to show EVE replacing her directive of bringing the plant to the captain with repairing WALL-E, and it made WALL-E even more heroic if he held the holo-detector open despite being badly hurt. Stanton also moved the moment where WALL-E reveals his plant (which he had snatched from the self-destructing escape pod) from producing it from a closet to immediately after his escape, as it made EVE happier and gave them stronger motivation to dance around the ship.[25] Stanton felt half the audience at the screening believed the humans would be unable to cope with living on Earth and would have died out after the film's end. Jim Capobianco, director of the Ratatouille short film Your Friend the Rat, created an end credits animation that continued the story—and stylized in different artistic movements throughout history—to clarify an optimistic tone.[31]

text: Design[edit]

text: WALL-E was the most complex Pixar production since Monsters, Inc. because of the world and the history that had to be conveyed.[12] Whereas most Pixar films have up to 75,000 storyboards, WALL-E required 125,000.[32] Production designer Ralph Eggleston wanted the lighting of the first act on Earth to be romantic, and that of the second act on the Axiom to be cold and sterile. During the third act, the romantic lighting is slowly introduced into the Axiom environment.[9] Pixar studied Chernobyl and the city of Sofia to create the ruined world; art director Anthony Christov was from Bulgaria and recalled Sofia used to have problems storing its garbage.[33][34] Eggleston bleached out the whites on Earth to make WALL-E feel vulnerable. The overexposed light makes the location look more vast. Because of the haziness, the cubes making up the towers of garbage had to be large, otherwise they would have lost shape (in turn, this helped save rendering time). The dull tans of Earth subtly become soft pinks and blues when EVE arrives. When WALL-E shows EVE all his collected items, all the lights he has collected light up to give an inviting atmosphere, like a Christmas tree. Eggleston tried to avoid the colors yellow and green so WALL-E—who was made yellow to emulate a tractor—would not blend into the deserted Earth, and to make the plant more prominent.[35]

text: Stanton also wanted the lighting to look realistic and evoke the science fiction films of his youth. He thought that Pixar captured the physics of being underwater with Finding Nemo and so for WALL-E, he wanted to push that for air. While rewatching some of his favorite science fiction films, he realized that Pixar's other movies had lacked the look of 70 mm film and its barrel distortion, lens flare, and racking focus.[12] Producer Jim Morris invited Roger Deakins and Dennis Muren to advise on lighting and atmosphere. Muren spent several months with Pixar, while Deakins hosted one talk and was requested to stay on for another two weeks. Stanton said Muren's experience came from integrating computer animation into live-action settings, while Deakins helped them understand not to overly complicate their camerawork and lighting.[29] 1970s Panavision cameras were used to help the animators understand and replicate handheld imperfections like unfocused backgrounds in digital environments.[9] The first lighting test included building a three-dimensional replica of WALL-E, filming it with a 70 mm camera, and then trying to replicate that in the computer.[36] Stanton cited the shallow lens work of Gus Van Sant's films as an influence, as it created intimacy in each close-up. Stanton chose angles for the virtual cameras that a live-action filmmaker would choose if filming on a set.[16]

text: Stanton wanted the Axiom's interior to resemble Shanghai and Dubai.[12] Eggleston studied 1960s NASA paintings and the original concept art for Tomorrowland for the Axiom, to reflect that era's sense of optimism.[9] Stanton remarked "We are all probably very similar in our backgrounds here [at Pixar] in that we all miss the Tomorrowland that was promised us from the heyday of Disneyland," and wanted a "jet pack" feel.[12] Pixar also studied the Disney Cruise Line and visited Las Vegas, which was helpful in understanding artificial lighting.[9] Eggleston based his Axiom designs on the futuristic architecture of Santiago Calatrava. Eggleston divided the inside of the ship into three sections; the rear's economy class has a basic gray concrete texture with graphics keeping to the red, blue, and white of the BnL logo. The coach class with living/shopping spaces has "S" shapes as people are always looking for "what's around the corner". Stanton intended to have many colorful signs, but he realized this would overwhelm the audience and went with Eggleston's original idea of a small number of larger signs. The premier class is a large Zen-like spa with colors limited to turquoise, cream, and tan, and leads on to the captain's warm carpeted and wooded quarters and the sleek dark bridge.[35] In keeping with the artificial Axiom, camera movements were modeled after those of the steadicam.[37]

text: The use of live action was a stepping stone for Pixar, as Stanton was planning to make John Carter of Mars his next project.[12] Storyboarder Derek Thompson noted introducing live action meant that they would make the rest of the film look even more realistic.[38] Eggleston added that if the historical humans had been animated and slightly caricaturized, the audience then would not have been able to recognize how serious their devolution was.[35] Stanton cast Fred Willard as the historical Buy n Large CEO because "[h]e's the most friendly and insincere car salesman I could think of."[26] The CEO says "stay the course", which Stanton used because he thought it was funny.[39] Industrial Light & Magic did the visual effects for these shots.[9]

text: Animation[edit]

text: WALL-E went undeveloped during the 1990s partly because Stanton and Pixar were not confident enough yet to have a feature length film with a main character that behaved like Luxo Jr. or R2-D2.[13] Stanton explained there are two types of robots in cinema: "human[s] with metal skin", like the Tin Man, or "machine[s] with function" like Luxo and R2. He found the latter idea "powerful" because it allowed the audience to project personalities onto the characters, as they do with babies and pets: "You're compelled ... you almost can't stop yourself from finishing the sentence 'Oh, I think it likes me! I think it's hungry! I think it wants to go for a walk!'"[40] He added, "We wanted the audience to believe they were witnessing a machine that has come to life."[9] The animators visited recycling stations to study machinery, and also met robot designers, visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study robots, watched a recording of a Mars rover,[20] and borrowed a bomb detecting robot from the San Francisco Police Department. Simplicity was preferred in their performances as giving them too many movements would make them feel human.[9]

text: Stanton wanted WALL-E to be a box and EVE to be like an egg.[41] WALL-E's eyes were inspired by a pair of binoculars Stanton was given when watching the Oakland Athletics play against the Boston Red Sox. He "missed the entire inning" because he was distracted by them.[42] The director was reminded of Buster Keaton and decided the robot would not need a nose or mouth.[43] Stanton added a zoom lens to make WALL-E more sympathetic.[43] Ralph Eggleston noted this feature gave the animators more to work with and gave the robot a childlike quality.[35] Pixar's studies of trash compactors during their visits to recycling stations inspired his body.[9] His tank treads were inspired by a wheelchair someone had developed that used treads instead of wheels.[41] The animators wanted him to have elbows, but realized this was unrealistic because he is only designed to pull garbage into his body.[9] His arms also looked flimsy when they did a test of him waving.[41] Animation director Angus MacLane suggested they attach his arms to a track on the sides of his body to move them around, based on the inkjet printers his father designed. This arm design contributed to creating the character's posture, so if they wanted him to be nervous, they would lower them.[44] Stanton was unaware of the similarities between WALL-E and Johnny 5 from Short Circuit until others pointed it out to him.[13]

text: Stanton wanted EVE to be at the higher end of technology, and asked iPod designer Jonathan Ive to inspect her design. He was very impressed.[12] Her eyes are modelled on Lite-Brite toys,[43] but Pixar chose not to make them overly expressive as it would be too easy to have her eyes turn into hearts to express love or something similar.[41] Her limited design meant the animators had to treat her like a drawing, relying on posing her body to express emotion.[9] They also found her similar to a manatee or a narwhal because her floating body resembled an underwater creature.[41] Auto was a conscious homage to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the usage of Also sprach Zarathustra for the showdown between the captain and Auto furthers that.[13][not in citation given] The manner in which he hangs from a wall gives him a threatening feel, like a spider.[45] Originally, Auto was designed entirely differently, resembling EVE, but masculine and authoritative; the Steward robots were also more aggressive Patrol-bots.[25] The majority of the robot cast were formed with the Build-a-bot program, where different heads, arms and treads were combined together in over a hundred variations.[9] The humans were modelled on sea lions due to their blubbery bodies,[35] as well as babies. The filmmakers noticed baby fat is a lot tighter than adult fat and copied that texture for the film's humans.[46]

text: To animate their robots, the film's story crew and animation crew watched a Keaton and a Charlie Chaplin film every day for almost a year, and occasionally a Harold Lloyd picture.[13] Afterwards, the filmmakers knew all emotions could be conveyed silently. Stanton cited Keaton's "great stone face" as giving them perseverance in animating a character with an unchanging expression.[43] As he rewatched these, Stanton felt that filmmakers—since the advent of sound—relied on dialogue too much to convey exposition.[13] The filmmakers dubbed the cockroach WALL-E keeps as a pet "Hal", in reference to silent film producer Hal Roach (as well as being an additional reference to HAL 9000).[9] They also watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf, films that had sound but were not reliant on dialogue.[38] Stanton acknowledged Silent Running as an influence because its silent robots were a forerunner to the likes of R2-D2,[29] and that the "hopeless romantic" Woody Allen also inspired WALL-E.[17]

text: Sound[edit]

text: Producer Jim Morris recommended Ben Burtt as sound designer for WALL-E because Stanton kept using R2-D2 as the benchmark for the robots.[30] Burtt had completed Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and told his wife he would no longer work on films with robots, but found WALL-E and its substitution of voices with sound "fresh and exciting".[9] He recorded 2500 sounds for the film, which was twice the average number for a Star Wars film,[20] and a record in his career.[9] Burtt began work in 2005,[47] and experimented with filtering his voice for two years.[48] Burtt described the robot voices as "like a toddler [...] universal language of intonation. 'Oh', 'Hm?', 'Huh!', you know?"[49]

text: During production Burtt had the opportunity to look at the items used by Jimmy MacDonald, Disney's in-house sound designer for many of their classic films. Burtt used many of MacDonald's items on WALL-E. Because Burtt was not simply adding sound effects in post-production, the animators were always evaluating his new creations and ideas, which Burtt found an unusual experience.[50] He worked in sync with the animators, returning their animation after adding the sounds to give them more ideas.[9] Burtt would choose scientifically accurate sounds for each character, but if he could not find one that worked, he would choose a dramatic and unrealistic noise.[50] Burtt would find hundreds of sounds by looking at concept art of characters, before he and Stanton pared it down to a distinct few for each robot.[12]

text: Burtt saw a hand-cranked electrical generator while watching Island in the Sky, and bought an identical, unpacked device from 1950 on eBay to use for WALL-E moving around.[51] Burtt also used an automobile self starter for when WALL-E goes fast,[50] and the sound of cars being wrecked at a demolition derby provided for WALL-E's compressing trash in his body.[52] The Macintosh computer chime was used to signify when WALL-E has fully recharged his battery. For EVE, Burtt wanted her humming to have a musical quality.[50] Burtt was only able to provide neutral or masculine voices, so Pixar employee Elissa Knight was asked to provide her voice for Burtt to electronically modify. Stanton deemed the sound effect good enough to properly cast her in the role.[39] Burtt recorded a flying 10-foot-long (3.0 m) radio-controlled jet plane for EVE's flying,[9] and for her plasma cannon, Burtt hit a slinky hung from a ladder with a timpani stick. He described it as a "cousin" to the blaster noise from Star Wars.[53]

text: MacInTalk was used because Stanton "wanted Auto to be the epitome of a robot, cold, zeros & ones, calculating, and soulless [and] Stephen Hawking's kind of voice I thought was perfect."[29] Additional sounds for the character were meant to give him a clockwork feel, to show he is always thinking and calculating.[50]

text: Burtt had visited Niagara Falls in 1987 and used his recordings from his trip for the sounds of wind.[52] He ran around a hall with a canvas bag up to record the sandstorm though.[9] For the scene where WALL-E runs from falling shopping carts, Burtt and his daughter went to a supermarket and placed a recorder in their cart. They crashed it around the parking lot and then let it tumble down a hill.[54] To create Hal (WALL-E's pet cockroach)'s skittering, he recorded the clicking caused by taking apart and reassembling handcuffs.[9]

text: Music[edit]

text: Thomas Newman recollaborated with Stanton on WALL-E since the two got along well on Nemo, which gave Newman the Annie Award for Best Music in an Animated Feature. He began writing the score in 2005, in the hope that starting this task early would make him more involved with the finished film. But, Newman remarked that animation is so dependent on scheduling he should have begun work earlier on when Stanton and Reardon were writing the script. EVE's theme was arranged for the first time in October 2007. Her theme when played as she first flies around Earth originally used more orchestral elements, and Newman was encouraged to make it sound more feminine.[55] Newman said Stanton had thought up many ideas for how he wanted the music to sound, and he generally followed them as he found scoring a partially silent film difficult. Stanton wanted the whole score to be orchestral, but Newman felt limited by this idea especially in scenes aboard the Axiom, and used electronics too.[56]

text: Stanton originally wanted to juxtapose the opening shots of space with 1930s French swing music, but he saw The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and did not want to appear as if he were copying it. Stanton then thought about the song "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" from Hello, Dolly!, since he had portrayed the sidekick Barnaby Tucker in a 1980 high school production.[57] Stanton found that the song was about two naive young men looking for love, which was similar to WALL-E's own hope for companionship. Jim Reardon suggested WALL-E find the film on video, and Stanton included "It Only Takes a Moment" and the clip of the actors holding hands, because he wanted a visual way to show how WALL-E understands love and conveys it to EVE. Hello Dolly! composer Jerry Herman allowed the songs to be used without knowing what for; when he saw the film, he found its incorporation into the story "genius".[58] Coincidentally, Newman's uncle Lionel worked on Hello, Dolly![9]

text: Newman travelled to London to compose the end credits song "Down to Earth" with Peter Gabriel, who was one of Stanton's favorite musicians. Afterwards, Newman rescored some of the film to include the song's composition, so it would not sound intrusive when played.[9] Louis Armstrong's rendition of "La Vie en rose" was used for a montage where WALL-E does not get EVE's attention on Earth. The script also specified using Bing Crosby's "Stardust" for when the two robots dance around the Axiom,[11] but Newman asked if he could score the scene himself. A similar switch occurred for the sequence in which WALL-E attempts to wake EVE up through various means; originally, the montage would play with the instrumental version of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", but Newman wanted to challenge himself and scored an original piece for the sequence.[59]

text: Themes[edit]

text: This movie is widely recognized as a critique on society. It brings up real issues that the world, and especially densely populated areas, are dealing with today and even more so in the future. Katherine Ellison asserts that "Americans produce nearly 400 million tons of solid waste per year but recycle less than a third of it, according to a recent Columbia University study." Landfills are filling up so quickly that the UK may run out of landfill space by the year 2017.[60]

text: Environment and waste[edit]

text: Because WALL-E overtly critiques consumerism, it also critiques Disney's production values and aesthetic, without being too obvious.[3] In the DVD commentary, Stanton said that he has been asked if it was his intention to make a movie about consumerism. His answer was it was not; it was a way to answer the question of how would the Earth get to the state where one robot would be left to continue the cleanup by itself.

text: In "WALL-E: from environmental adaption to sentimental nostalgia," Robin Murray and Joseph Heuman explain the important theme of nostalgia in this film. Nostalgia is clearly represented by human artifacts, left behind, that WALL-E collects and cherishes, i.e. Zippo lighters, hubcaps, and plastic sporks. These modern items that we use out of necessity, are made sentimental through the lens of the bleak future of Earth. Nostalgia is also expressed through the musical score, as the film opens with a camera shot of outer space that slowly zooms into a waste filled Earth while playing "Put on Your Sunday Clothes", reflecting on simpler and happier times in human history. This film also expresses nostalgia through the longing of nature and the natural world, as it is the sight and feeling of soil, and the plant brought back to the space ship by EVE, that make the captain decide it is time for humans to move back to Earth. WALL-E expresses nostalgia also, by reflecting on romantic themes of older Disney and silent films.[3]

text: Stanton describes the theme of the film as "irrational love defeats life's programming":[26]

text: I realized the point I was trying to push with these two programmed robots was the desire for them to try and figure out what the point of living was ... It took these really irrational acts of love to sort of discover them against how they were built ... 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. To avoid having to do the messy part. To avoid having relationships with other people or dealing with the person next to us. That's why we can all get on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another. I thought, 'That's a perfect amplification of the whole point of the movie.' I wanted to run with science in a way that would sort of logically project that.[26]

text: Technology[edit]

text: Stanton noted many commentators placed emphasis on the environmental aspect of humanity's complacency in the film, because "that disconnection is going to be the cause, indirectly, of anything that happens in life that's bad for humanity or the planet".[61] Stanton said that by taking away effort to work, the robots also take away humanity's need to put effort into relationships.[45] Christian journalist Rod Dreher saw technology as the complicated villain of the film. The humans' artificial lifestyle on the Axiom has separated them from nature, making them "slaves of both technology and their own base appetites, and have lost what makes them human". Dreher contrasted the hardworking, dirt covered WALL-E with the sleek clean robots on the ship. However, it is the humans and not the robots who make themselves redundant. Humans on the ship and on Earth have overused robots and the ultra-modern technology. During the end credits, humans and robots are shown working alongside each other to renew the Earth. "WALL-E is not a Luddite film," he said. "It doesn't demonize technology. It only argues that technology is properly used to help humans cultivate their true nature—that it must be subordinate to human flourishing, and help move that along."[62]

text: Religion[edit]

text: Stanton, who is a Christian,[14] named EVE after the Biblical figure because WALL-E's loneliness reminded him of Adam, before God created his wife.[63] Dreher noted EVE's biblical namesake and saw her directive as an inversion of that story; EVE uses the plant to tell humanity to return to Earth and move away from the "false god" of BnL and the lazy lifestyle it offers. Dreher also noted this departure from classical Christian viewpoints, where Adam is cursed to labor, in that WALL-E argues hard work is what makes humans human. Dreher emphasized the false god parallels to BnL in a scene where a robot teaches infants "B is for Buy n Large, your very best friend", which he compared to modern corporations such as McDonald's creating brand loyalty in children.[62] Megan Basham of World magazine felt the film criticizes the pursuit of leisure, whereas WALL-E in his stewardship learns to truly appreciate God's creation.[14]

text: During writing, a Pixar employee noted to Jim Reardon that EVE was reminiscent of the dove with the olive branch from the story of Noah's Ark, and the story was reworked with EVE finding a plant to return humanity from its voyage.[64] WALL-E himself has been compared to Prometheus,[30] Sisyphus,[62] and Butades: in an essay discussing WALL-E as representative of the artistic strive of Pixar itself, Hrag Vartanian compared WALL-E to Butades in a scene where the robot expresses his love for EVE by making a sculpture of her from spare parts. "The Ancient Greek tradition associates the birth of art with a Corinthian maiden who longing to preserve her lover's shadow traces it on the wall before he departed for war. The myth reminds us that art was born out of longing and often means more for the creator than the muse. In the same way Stanton and his Pixar team have told us a deeply personal story about their love of cinema and their vision for animation through the prism of all types of relationships."[65]

text: Release[edit]

text: Continuing a Pixar tradition, WALL-E was paired with a short film for its theatrical release, Presto. The film was dedicated to Justin Wright (1981–2008), a Pixar animator who had worked on Ratatouille and died of a heart attack before WALL-E's release.[9]

text: Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) built animatronic WALL-E's to promote the picture, which made appearances at Disneyland Resort,[66] the Franklin Institute, the Miami Science Museum, the Seattle Center, and the Tokyo International Film Festival.[67] Due to safety concerns, the 318 kg robots were always strictly controlled and WDI always needed to know exactly what they were required to interact with. For this reason, they generally refused to have their puppets meet and greet children at the theme parks in case a WALL-E trod on a child's foot. Those who wanted to take a photograph with the character had to make do with a cardboard cutout.[68]

text: Very small quantities of merchandise were sold for WALL-E, as Cars items were still popular, and many manufacturers were more interested in Speed Racer, which was a successful line despite the film's failure at the box office. Thinkway, which created the WALL-E toys, had previously made Toy Story dolls when other toy producers had not shown an interest.[67] Among Thinkway's items were a WALL-E that danced when connected to a music player, a toy that could be taken apart and reassembled, and a groundbreaking remote control toy of him and EVE that had motion sensors that allowed them to interact with players.[69] There were even plushies.[70] The "Ultimate WALL-E" figures were not in stores until the film's home release in November 2008,[67] at a retail price of almost $200, leading The Patriot-News to deem it an item for "hard-core fans and collectors only".[69] On February 4, 2015, Lego announced that a WALL-E custom built by lead animator Angus MacLane was the latest design approved for mass production and release as part of Lego Ideas.[71]

text: The movie was not allowed to be screened in theaters in the People's Republic of China by authorities there.[72]

text: Home media[edit]

text: The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on November 18, 2008. The various editions included Presto, a new short film BURN-E, the Leslie Iwerks documentary film The Pixar Story, shorts about the history of Buy n Large, behind-the-scenes special features, and a Digital Copy of the film that can be played through iTunes or Windows Media and compatible devices.[73] This release sold 9,042,054 DVD units ($142,633,974) in total becoming the second best-selling animated DVD among those released in 2008 in units sold (behind Kung Fu Panda), the best-selling animated feature in sales revenue, and the third best-selling among all 2008 DVD's.[74]

text: Reception[edit]

text: Box office[edit]

text: WALL-E grossed $223.8 million in the USA and Canada and $309.5 million overseas for a worldwide total of $533.3 million making it the ninth highest grossing film of 2008.[2]

text: The film premiered at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on June 23, 2008.[75]

text: In the US and Canada, it opened in 3,992 theaters on June 27, 2008. During its opening weekend, it topped the box office with $63,087,526[76] making this the fifth-best opening weekend for a Pixar film[77] and the fourth-best opening among films released in June.[78] The movie earned $94.7 million in its first week and crossed the $200 million mark during its sixth weekend.[79]

text: WALL-E grossed over $10 million in Japan ($44,005,222), UK, Ireland and Malta ($41,215,600), France and the Maghreb region ($27,984,103), Germany ($24,130,400), Mexico ($17,679,805), Spain ($14,973,097), Australia ($14,165,390), Italy ($12,210,993), and Russia and the CIS ($11,694,482).[80]

text: Critical reaction[edit]

text: The American Film Institute named WALL-E as one of the best films of 2008;[81] the jury rationale states:

text: WALL•E proves to this generation and beyond that the film medium's only true boundaries are the human imagination. Writer/director Andrew Stanton and his team have created a classic screen character from a metal trash compactor who rides to the rescue of a planet buried in the debris that embodies the broken promise of American life. Not since Chaplin's "Little Tramp" has so much story—so much emotion—been conveyed without words. When hope arrives in the form of a seedling, the film blossoms into one of the great screen romances as two robots remind audiences of the beating heart in all of us that yearns for humanity—and love—in the darkest of landscapes.

text: The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 96% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based upon a sample of 248 reviews, with an average rating of 8.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads "Charming, audacious, and timely, WALL-E's lighthearted magic and stellar visuals testify once again to Pixar's ingenuity."[82] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 95 based on 39 representing "universal acclaim".[83] indieWire named WALL-E the third best film of the year based on their annual survey of 100 film critics, while Movie City News shows that WALL-E appeared in 162 different Top 10 lists, out of 286 different critics lists surveyed, the most mentions on a Top 10 list of any film released in 2008.[84]

text: Richard Corliss of Time named WALL-E his favorite film of 2008 (and later of the decade), noting the film succeeded in "connect[ing] with a huge audience" despite the main characters' lack of speech and "emotional signifiers like a mouth, eyebrows, shoulders, [and] elbows". It "evoke[d] the splendor of the movie past" and he also compared WALL-E and EVE's relationship to the chemistry of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.[85] Other critics who named WALL-E their favorite film of 2008 included Tom Charity of CNN,[86] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, A. O. Scott of The New York Times, Christopher Orr of The New Republic, Ty Burr and Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal, and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.[87]

text: Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film "Pixar's ninth consecutive wonder", saying it was imaginative yet straightforward. He said it pushed the boundaries of animation by balancing esoteric ideas with more immediately accessible ones, and that the main difference between the film and other science fiction projects rooted in an apocalypse was its optimism.[88] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter declared that WALL-E surpassed the achievements of Pixar's previous eight features and probably their most original film to date. He said it had the "heart, soul, spirit and romance" of the best silent films. Honeycutt said the film's definitive stroke of brilliance was in using a mix of archive film footage and computer graphics to trigger WALL-E's romantic leanings. He praised Burtt's sound design, saying "If there is such a thing as an aural sleight of hand, this is it."[89]

text: Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times named WALL-E "an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment, and a decent science-fiction story" and said the scarcity of dialogue would allow it to "cross language barriers" in a manner appropriate to the global theme, and noted it would appeal to adults and children. He praised the animation, describing the color palette as "bright and cheerful [...] and a little bit realistic", and that Pixar managed to generate a "curious" regard for the WALL-E, comparing his "rusty and hard-working and plucky" design favorably to more obvious attempts at creating "lovable" lead characters. He said WALL-E was concerned with ideas rather than spectacle, saying it would trigger stimulating "little thoughts for the younger viewers."[90] He named it as one of his twenty favorite films of 2008 and argued it was "the best science-fiction movie in years".[91]

text: The film was interpreted as tackling a topical, ecologically-minded agenda,[82] though McCarthy said it did so with a lightness of touch that granted the viewer the ability to accept or ignore the message.[88] Kyle Smith of the New York Post, wrote that by depicting future humans as "a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk", WALL-E was darker and more cynical than any major Disney feature film he could recall. He compared the humans to the patrons of Disney's Parks and Resorts, adding, "I'm also not sure I've ever seen a major corporation spend so much money to issue an insult to its customers."[92] Maura Judkis of U.S. News & World Report questioned whether this depiction of "frighteningly obese humans" would resonate with children and make them prefer to "play outside rather than in front of the computer, to avoid a similar fate".[93] The interpretation led to criticism of the film by conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck, and contributors to National Review Online including Shannen W. Coffin and Jonah Goldberg (although he admitted it was a "fascinating" and occasionally "brilliant" production).[94][not in citation given]

text: A few notable critics have argued that the film is vastly overrated,[95] claiming it failed to "live up to such blinding, high-wattage enthusiasm",[96] and that there were "chasms of boredom watching it", in particular "the second and third acts spiraled into the expected".[97] Other labels included "preachy"[95] and "too long".[96] Child reviews sent into CBBC were mixed, some citing boredom and an inadequate storyline.[98]

text: Patrick J. Ford of The American Conservative said WALL-E's conservative critics missed lessons in the film that he felt appealed to traditional conservatism. He argued that the mass consumerism in the film was not shown to be a product of big business, but of too close a tie between big business and big government: "The government unilaterally provided its citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth's downfall." Responding to Coffin's claim that the film points out the evils of mankind, Ford argued the only evils depicted were those that resulted from losing touch with our own humanity and that fundamental conservative representations such as the farm, the family unit, and wholesome entertainment were in the end held aloft by the human characters. He concluded, "By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice."[99]

text: Director Terry Gilliam praised the film as "A stunning bit of work. The scenes on what was left of planet Earth are just so beautiful: one of the great silent movies. And the most stunning artwork! It says more about ecology and society than any live action film—all the people on their loungers floating around, brilliant stuff. Their social comment was so smart and right on the button."[100]

text: Archaeologists have commented on the themes of human evolution that the film explores.[101] Ben Marwick has written how the character of WALL-E resembles an archaeologist with his methodical collection and classification of quotidian human artefacts. He is shown facing a typological dilemma of classifying a spork as either a fork or spoon, and his nostalgic interest in the human past further demonstrated by his attachment to repeated viewings of the 1969 film Hello, Dolly!. Marwick notes that the film features major human evolutionary transitions such as obligate bipedalism (captain of the spaceship struggles with the autopilot to gain control of the vessel) and the invention of agriculture, as part of watershed moments in the story of the film. According to Marwick, one prominent message of the film "appears to be that the envelopment by technology that the humans in Wall-E experience paradoxically results in physical and cultural devolution." Scholars such as Ian Tattersall and Steve Jones have similarly discussed scenarios where elements of modern technology (such as medicine) may have caused human evolution to slow or stop.

text: Accolades[edit]

text: WALL-E won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing at the 81st Academy Awards, which it lost to Slumdog Millionaire (Original Score, Original Song, Sound Mixing), The Dark Knight (Sound Editing), and Milk (Original Screenplay).[102][103] Walt Disney Pictures also pushed for an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination,[104] but it was not nominated, provoking controversy as to whether the Academy deliberately restricted WALL-E to the Best Animated Feature category.[105] Peter Travers commented that "If there was ever a time where an animated feature deserved to be nominated for best picture it's Wall-E."[106] Only three animated films, 1991's Beauty and the Beast and Pixar's next two films, 2009's Up and 2010's Toy Story 3, have ever been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. A reflective Stanton stated he was not disappointed the film was restricted to the Best Animated Film nomination because he was overwhelmed by the film's positive reception, and eventually "The line [between live-action and animation] is just getting so blurry that I think with each proceeding year, it's going to be tougher and tougher to say what's an animated movie and what's not an animated movie."[19]

text: WALL-E made a healthy appearance at the various 2008 end-of-the-year awards circles, particularly in the Best Picture category, where animated films are often overlooked. It has won the award, or the equivalent of it, from the Boston Society of Film Critics (tied with Slumdog Millionaire),[107] the Chicago Film Critics Association,[108] the Central Ohio Film Critics awards,[109] the Online Film Critics Society,[110] and most notably the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, where it became the first animated feature to win the prestigious award.[111] It was named as one of 2008's ten best films by the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.[112][113]

text: It won Best Animated Feature Film at the 66th Golden Globe Awards, 81st Academy Awards, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards 2008.[114][115] It was nominated for several awards at the 2009 Annie Awards, including Best Feature Film, Animated Effects, Character Animation, Direction, Production design, Storyboarding and Voice acting (for Ben Burtt);[116] but was beaten out by Kung Fu Panda in every category.[117] It won Best Animated Feature at the 62nd British Academy Film Awards and was also nominated there for Best Music and Sound.[118] Thomas Newman and Peter Gabriel won two Grammy Awards for "Down to Earth" and "Define Dancing".[119] It won all three awards it was nominated for by the Visual Effects Society: Best Animation, Best Character Animation (for WALL-E and EVE in the truck) and Best Effects in the Animated Motion Picture categories.[120] It became the first animated film to win Best Editing for a Comedy or Musical from the American Cinema Editors.[121] In 2009, Stanton, Reardon, and Docter won the Nebula Award, beating The Dark Knight and the Stargate Atlantis episode "The Shrine".[122][123] It won Best Animated Film and was nominated for Best Director at the Saturn Awards.[124]

text: At the British National Movie Awards, which is voted for by the public, it won Best Family Film.[125] It was also voted Best Feature Film at the British Academy Children's Awards.[126] WALL-E was listed at #63 on Empire's online poll of the 100 greatest movie characters, conducted in 2008.[127] In early 2010, TIME ranked WALL-E #1 in "Best Movies of the Decade".[6] In Sight & Sound magazine's 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time, WALL-E is the second highest ranking animated film behind My Neighbor Totoro (1988), while tying with the film Spirited Away (2001) at 202nd overall.[128] In a 2016 BBC poll of international critics, it was voted the 29th greatest film since 2000.[129]

text: It was nominated for the 2009 Kids' Choice Awards, but lost to Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

text: Robotic recreations[edit]

text: In 2012, Mike McMaster,[130] an American robotics hobbyist, began working on his own model of WALL-E. The final product was built with more moving parts than the WALL-E which roams around Disneyland. McMaster's four-foot robot made an appearance at the Walt Disney Family Museum and was featured during the opening week of Tested.com[131] a project headed up by Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of MythBusters. Since WALL-E's creation, Mike and the popular robot have made dozens of appearances at various events.[132]

text: In 2012, Mike Senna completed his own WALL-E build.[133] He also created an EVE. They were present at a photo op at Disney's D23 Expo 2015.[134]


document_title: List of river borders of U.S. states

question_text: in which part of the u.s. is the majority of state boundaries based upon natural features

root

text: List of river borders of U.S. states

text: This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

tag: table

text: Because of its unique history, many of the boundaries of the political divisions of the United States were artificially constructed (rather than being permitted to evolve and drawn using natural features of the landscape). Therefore, many U.S. states have straight lines as boundaries, especially in the West. However, there are a number of states, particularly in the Midwest, North and South with at least partial river borders.

tag: p

text: The rule of the thread of the channel and its exceptions[edit]

text: Typically the boundary is the "thread of the channel", under a rule that the United States inherited from England, where it applies to boundaries between counties.[citation needed] There are at least four exceptions, where the boundary is one bank of the river rather than the thread of the channel:

text:
The boundary between New Hampshire and Vermont is the west bank of the Connecticut River. This was established as the eastern boundary of New York by a grant of King Charles II in 1664. It was disregarded by Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire, who treated the New Hampshire Grants west of the river as a de facto part of New Hampshire during the years 1649–1764, but King George III put an end to that in 1764. In August 1781 the Continental Congress decided it would recognize the then largely unrecognized state of Vermont, which had been organized in defiance of New York, on condition that Vermont would agree to certain boundaries. In 1782, the legislature of Vermont agreed, but nonetheless Vermont was not admitted to the Union until 1791. In 1933, citing the 1782 legislation, the United States Supreme Court denied the petition from the state of Vermont to make the boundary the thread of the channel.
The boundary between Kentucky and the three states to its north – Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois – is the north bank of the Ohio river. In 1763, Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War, whose North American theater was called the French and Indian War. At that time Canada, which had been a French colony, became a British colony, and Parliament made the north bank of the Ohio the southern boundary of Canada. The river was thus included in the district of Kentucky, which was then a part of Virginia until it became a separate state in 1792.[citation needed]
The boundary between Delaware and New Jersey north of 39° 30' north latitude is the east bank of the Delaware River.[citation needed]
The boundary between Delaware and New Jersey, south of a certain point, is the west bank of the Delaware River rather than the thread of the channel.
The boundary between Maryland and Virginia is the south bank of the Potomac River. This also applies both to the border between Maryland and West Virginia (from Harper's Ferry to the source of the Potomac near the Fairfax Stone) since the latter was at one point part of Virginia, and to the border between Virginia and Washington, D.C. since the capital was established from a section of Maryland property.

text: List of river borders[edit]

text:
Arthur Kill: New Jersey, New York (tidal strait)
Big Sandy River: Kentucky, West Virginia
Big Sioux River: South Dakota, Iowa
Blackwater River: Virginia, North Carolina
Bois de Sioux River: South Dakota, Minnesota, North Dakota
Brule River: Michigan, Wisconsin
Byram River: Connecticut, New York
Catawba River: North Carolina, South Carolina
Chattahoochee River: Alabama, Georgia
Chattooga River: Georgia, South Carolina
Colorado River: Arizona, Nevada, California, Baja California
Columbia River: Washington, Oregon
Connecticut River: New Hampshire, Vermont
Delaware River: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware
Des Moines River: Iowa, Missouri
Detroit River: Michigan, Ontario
Great Miami River (mouth only): Ohio, Indiana
Halls Stream: New Hampshire, Quebec
Hudson River (lower part only): New Jersey, New York
Kill Van Kull: New Jersey, New York (tidal strait)
Menominee River: Michigan, Wisconsin
Mississippi River: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana
Missouri River: South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas
Montreal River: Michigan (Upper Peninsula), Wisconsin
Niagara River: New York, Ontario
Ohio River: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia
Palmer River: Rhode Island, Massachusetts
Pawcatuck River: Connecticut, Rhode Island
Pearl River: Mississippi, Louisiana
Perdido River: Florida, Alabama
Pigeon River: Minnesota, Ontario
Pine River: Minnesota, Ontario
Piscataqua River: Maine, New Hampshire
Pocomoke River: Maryland, Virginia
Poteau River: Arkansas, Oklahoma
Potomac River: Maryland, Virginia, D.C., West Virginia
Poultney River: Vermont, New York
Rainy River: Minnesota, Ontario
Red River of the North: North Dakota, Minnesota
Red River of the South: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas
Rio Grande: New Mexico, Texas, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas
Runnins River: Rhode Island, Massachusetts
Sabine River: Texas, Louisiana
St. Clair River: Michigan, Ontario
St. Croix River (Maine-New Brunswick): Maine, New Brunswick
St. Croix River (Wisconsin-Minnesota): Minnesota, Wisconsin
St. Francis River (Missouri-Arkansas): Arkansas, Missouri
St. Francis River (Quebec-Maine): Maine, Quebec
St. John River: Maine, New Brunswick
St. Lawrence River: New York, Ontario
St. Louis River: Minnesota, Wisconsin
St. Marys River (Florida-Georgia): Florida, Georgia
St. Marys River (Michigan-Ontario): Michigan, Ontario
Salmon Falls River: New Hampshire, Maine
Savannah River: South Carolina, Georgia
Snake River: Idaho, Washington, Oregon
Tennessee River: Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama
Tug Fork River: Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia
Tugaloo River: Georgia, South Carolina
Wabash River: Illinois, Indiana

text: The course of the Charles River was used to indirectly define the border between Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Merrimack River defines part of the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which runs parallel to the river, three miles north of it (see Northern boundary of Massachusetts.)

text: Geography of the United StatesRivers of the United StatesBorders of U.S. statesBorder rivers

text: Articles lacking sources from December 2009All articles lacking sourcesAll articles with unsourced statementsArticles with unsourced statements from July 2015


document_title: Medea (play)

question_text: where does medea go at the end of the play

text: Medea (play)

text: History[edit]

text: Medea was first performed in 431 BC at the City Dionysia festival. Here every year three playwrights competed against each other, each writing a tetralogy of three tragedies and a satyr play (alongside Medea were Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play Theristai). In 431 the competition was among Euphorion (the son of famed playwright Aeschylus), Sophocles (Euripides' main rival) and Euripides. Euphorion won, and Euripides placed last.

text: While Medea is considered one of the great plays of the Western canon, the Athenian audience did not react so favorably, and it placed third out of the three competing plays at the Dionysia festival of 431 BC. A possible explanation is found in a scholium to line 264 of the play, which asserts that Medea's children were traditionally killed by the Corinthians after her escape;[3] Euripides' apparent invention of Medea's filicide might have offended its audience just as his first treatment of the Hippolytus myth did.[4] That Euripides and others took liberties with Medea's story may be inferred from the 1st century BC historian Diodorus Siculus: "Speaking generally, it is because of the desire of the tragic poets for the marvellous that so varied and inconsistent an account of Medea has been given out."[5] A common urban legend claimed that Euripides put the blame on Medea because the Corinthians have bribed him with a sum of five talents.[6]

text: In the 4th century BC, South-Italian vase painting offers a number of Medea-representations that are connected to Euripides' play — the most famous is a krater in Munich. However, these representations always differ considerably from the plots of the play or are too general to support any direct link to the play of Euripides – this might reflect the judgement on the play. However, the violent and powerful character of princess Medea, and her double nature — both loving and destructive — became a standard for the later periods of antiquity and seems to have inspired numerous adaptations.

text: With the rediscovery of the text in 1st-century Rome (the play was adapted by the tragedians Ennius, Lucius Accius, Ovid, Seneca the Younger and Hosidius Geta, among others), again in 16th-century Europe, and in the light of 20th century modern literary criticism, Medea has provoked differing reactions from differing critics and writers who have sought to interpret the reactions of their societies in the light of past generic assumptions, bringing a fresh interpretation to its universal themes of revenge and justice in an unjust society.

text: Form and themes[edit]

text: The form of the play differs from many other Greek tragedies by its simplicity: All scenes involve only two actors, Medea and someone else. The Chorus (A staple in Greek theater) would also usually be involved along with those two, representing the women of Corinth. These encounters serve to highlight Medea's skill and determination in manipulating powerful male figures to achieve her own ends. The play is also the only Greek tragedy in which a kin-killer makes it unpunished to the end of the play, and the only one about child-killing in which the deed is performed in cold blood as opposed to in a state of temporary madness.[7]

text: Euripides' characterization of Medea exhibits the inner emotions of passion, love, and vengeance. Medea is widely read as a proto-feminist text[8] to the extent that it sympathetically explores the disadvantages of being a woman in a patriarchal society,[9] although it has also been read as an expression of misogynist attitudes.[10] In conflict with this sympathetic undertone (or reinforcing a more negative reading) is Medea's barbarian identity, which would antagonize a 5th-century Greek audience.[11]

text: Plot[edit]

text: Medea is centered on a wife’s calculated desire for revenge against her unfaithful husband. The play is set in Corinth some time after Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece, where he met Medea. The play begins with Medea in a blind rage towards Jason for arranging to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon (king of Corinth). The nurse, overhearing Medea’s grief, fears what she might do to herself or her children.

text: Creon, in anticipation of Medea’s wrath, arrives and reveals his plans to send her into exile. Medea pleads for one day’s delay and eventually Creon acquiesces. In the next scene Jason arrives to explain his rationale for his apparent betrayal. He explains that he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to marry a royal princess, as Medea is only a barbarian woman, but hopes to someday join the two families and keep Medea as his mistress. Medea, and the chorus of Corinthian women, do not believe him. She reminds him that she left her own people for him ("I am the mother of your children. Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?"), and that she saved him and slew the dragon. Jason promises to support her after his new marriage, but Medea spurns him: "Marry the maid if thou wilt; perchance full soon thou mayst rue thy nuptials."

text: In the following scene Medea encounters Aegeus, King of Athens. He reveals to her that despite his marriage he is still without children. He visited the oracle who merely told him that he was instructed “not to unstop the wineskin’s neck.” Medea relays her current situation to him and begs for Aegeus to let her stay in Athens if she gives him drugs to end his infertility. Aegeus, unaware of Medea’s plans for revenge, agrees.

text: Medea then returns to plotting the murders of Glauce and Creon. She decides to poison some golden robes (a family heirloom and gift from the sun god Helios) and a coronet, in hopes that the bride will not be able to resist wearing them, and consequently be poisoned. Medea resolves to kill her own children as well, not because the children have done anything wrong, but because she feels it is the best way to hurt Jason. She calls for Jason once more and, in an elaborate ruse, apologizes to him for overreacting to his decision to marry Glauce. When Jason appears fully convinced that she regrets her actions, Medea begins to cry in mourning of her exile. She convinces Jason to allow her to give the robes to Glauce in hopes that Glauce might get Creon to lift the exile. Eventually Jason agrees and allows their children to deliver the poisoned robes as the gift-bearers.

text: Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection.

text: In the next scene a messenger recounts Glauce and Creon’s deaths. When the children arrived with the robes and coronet, Glauce gleefully put them on and went to find her father. Soon the poisons overtook Glauce and she fell to the floor, dying horribly and painfully. Creon clutched her tightly as he tried to save her and, by coming in contact with the robes and coronet, got poisoned and died as well.

text: Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea's gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too.

text: While Medea is pleased with her current success she decides to take it one step forward. Since Jason brought shame upon her for trying to start a new family, Medea resolves to destroy the family he was willing to give up by killing their sons. Medea does have a moment of hesitation when she considers the pain that her children’s deaths will put her through. However, she steels her resolve to cause Jason the most pain possible and rushes offstage with a knife to kill her children. As the chorus laments her decision, the children are heard screaming. Jason then rushes onto the scene to confront Medea about murdering Creon and Glauce and he quickly discovers that his children have been killed as well. Medea then appears above the stage with the bodies of her children in the chariot of the sun god Helios. When this play was put on, this scene was accomplished using the mechane device usually reserved for the appearance of a god or goddess. She confronts Jason, reveling in his pain at being unable to ever hold his children again:

text: I do not leave my children's bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera's precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom.

text: She escapes to Athens with the bodies. The chorus is left contemplating the will of Zeus in Medea's actions:

text: Manifold are thy shapings, Providence! / Many a hopeless matter gods arrange / What we expected never came to pass / What we did not expect the gods brought to bear / So have things gone, this whole experience through!

text: Modern productions and adaptations[edit]

text: Theatre[edit]

text:
Jean Anouilh adapted the Medea story in his French drama Médée in 1946
Robinson Jeffers adapted Medea into a hit Broadway play in 1947, in a famous production starring Judith Anderson, the first of three actresses to win a Tony Award for the role.
Ben Bagley's Shoestring Revue performed a musical parody off-Broadway in the 1950s which was later issued on an LP and a CD, and was revived in 1995. The same plot points take place, but Medea in Disneyland is a parody, in that it takes place in a Walt Disney animated cartoon
Canada's Stratford Festival staged an adaptation of Medea by Larry Fineberg in 1978, which starred Patricia Idlette in the title role.[12]
In 1982, George Eugeniou directed Medea in a Philip Vellacott Penguin translation at Theatro Technis with Angelique Rockas in the title role. Ned Chaillet of The Times is struck by the eruption of the wrath of Medea spurned in "the dangerous passions of Angelique Rockas", and Rosemary Say of The Sunday Telegraph lauds Rockas' performance as 'fiercely agile'[13] [Link to Live performance of Angelique Rockas as Medea ].[14] As for the production itself, Tom Vaughan of The Morning Star describes it as "sensitive and eloquent .... fit to stand beside the National's "Oresteia".[15]
Yukio Ninagawa staged a production called Ohjo Media（王女メディア）in 1978, followed by a second version in 2005[16]
In 1983, kabuki Master Shozo Sato created Kabuki Medea uniting Euripides play and classical Kabuki storytelling and presentation.[17] It debuted at Wisdom Bridge Theater in Chicago.[18][19]
The 1990 play Pecong, by Steve Carter, is a retelling of Medea set on a fictional Caribbean island around the turn of the 20th century
The play was staged at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End, in a translation by Alistair Elliot.[20] The production was directed by Jonathan Kent and starred Diana Rigg.[20] The Evening Standard described Rigg's performance as "the performance she was born to give" while the Mail on Sunday described it as "unquestionably the performance of her life."[20] Peter J. Davison provided the scenic design and Jonathan Dove the music.[20] The production opened on 19 October 1993.[20]
Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou makes a parody of this tragedy in his comedy Medea (1993).[21][22]
A 1993 dance-theatre retelling of the Medea myth was produced by Edafos Dance Theatre, directed by avant-garde stage director and choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou
John Fisher wrote a camp musical version of Medea entitled Medea the Musical that re-interpreted the play in light of gay culture. The production was first staged in 1994 in Berkeley, California.[23]
On November 1997 National Theatre of Greece launched a worldwide tour of Medea, a critically acclaimed production directed by Nikaiti Kontouri, starring Karyofyllia Karambeti as Medea, Kostas Triantafyllopoulos as Creon and Lazaros Georgakopoulos as Jason. The tour included performances in France, Australia, Israel, Portugal, United States, Canada, Turkey, Bulgaria, China and Japan and lasted almost two years, until July 1999.[24][25] The play opened in the United States at Shubert Theatre in Boston (18 and 19 September 1998) and then continued at City Center Theatre in Manhattan, New York City (23 to 27 September 1998), receiving a very positive review from The New York Times.[26]
Neil Labute wrote Medea Redux, a modern retelling, first performed in 1999 starring Calista Flockhart as part of his one act trilogy entitled Bash: Latter-Day Plays. In this version, the main character is seduced by her middle school teacher. He abandons her, and she kills their child out of revenge.
Michael John LaChiusa created a Broadway musical adaptation work for Audra McDonald entitled Marie Christine in 1999 . McDonald portrayed the title role, and the show was set in New Orleans and Chicago respectively in 1999
Liz Lochhead's Medea previewed at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow as part of Theatre Babel's[27] Greeks in 2000 before the Edinburgh Fringe and national tour. 'What Lochhead does is to recast MEDEA as an episode-ancient but new, cosmic yet agonisingly familiar- in a sex war which is recognisable to every woman, and most of the men, in the theatre.' The Scotsman
In 2000 Wesley Enoch wrote and directed a modern adaptation titled Black Medea, which was first produced by Sydney Theatre Company’s Blueprint at the Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney, on 19 August 2000. Nathan Ramsay played the part of Jason, Tessa Rose played Medea, and Justine Saunders played the Chorus. Medea is re-characterised as an indigenous woman transported from her homeland to the city and about to be abandoned by her abusive social-climbing husband.[28]
Tom Lanoye (2001) used the story of Medea to bring up modern problems (such as migration and man vs. woman), resulting in a modernized version of Medea. His version also aims to analyze ideas such as the love that develops from the initial passion, problems in the marriage, and the "final hour" of the love between Jason and Medea
Kristina Leach adapted the story for her play The Medea Project, which had its world premiere at the Hunger Artists Theatre Company in 2004 and placed the story in a modern-day setting.[29]
Peter Stein directed Medea in Epidaurus 2005
Irish playwright Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats is a modern re-telling of Euripides' Medea
In November 2008, Theatre Arcadia, under the direction of Katerina Paliou, staged Medea at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (University of Alexandria, Egypt). The production was noted (by Nehad Selaiha of the weekly Al-Ahram) not only for its unexpected change of plot at the very end but also for its chorus of one hundred who alternated their speech between Arabic and English. The translation used was that of George Theodoridis
US Latina playwright Caridad Svich's 2009 play Wreckage, which premiered at Crowded Fire Theatre in San Francisco, tells the story of Medea from the sons' point of view, in the afterlife
Paperstrangers Performance Group[30] toured a critically acclaimed production of Medea directed by Michael Burke to U.S. Fringe Festivals in 2009 and 2010.
Luis Alfaro's re-imagining of Medea, Mojada, world premiered at Victory Gardens Theater in 2013.
Theatre Lab's production, by Greek director Anastasia Revi, opened at The Riverside Studios, London, on 5 March 2014.
The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherríe Moraga takes elements of Medea and of other works[31]
14 July – 4 September 2014 London Royal National Theatre staging of Euripides in a new version by Ben Power, starring Helen McCrory as Medea, directed by Carrie Cracknell, music by Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp.
25 September – 14 November 2015 London Almeida Theatre a new adaptation by Rachel Cusk, starring Kate Fleetwood as Medea, directed by Rupert Goold.
February 17 – March 6, 2016 in Austin at the Long Center for the Performing Arts starring Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Medea and directed by Ann Ciccolella.
May 2016 – MacMillan Films released a full staging of the original Medea which was staged for camera. The DVD release shows the entire play. complete with the Aegis scenes, choral odes and triumphant ending. Directed by James Thomas and starring Olivia Sutherland, the staging features Peter Arnott's critically acclaimed translation.
Chico Buarque and Paulo Pontes, Gota d'Água (musical play set in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, based on Euripides, 1975). Several times revived, including a 2016/2017 production starring Laila Garin (celebrated for her title role in the highly regarded musical biography of Elis Regina, staged in Brasil in 2015).
February 2017: the play was staged in South Korea, directed by Hungarian theatre director Róbert Alföldi, with Lee Hye-young in the titular role.[32]

text: Film[edit]

text:
Pier Paolo Pasolini adapted the legend into a movie of the same name in 1969 starring Maria Callas as Medea
In the 1983 film Storia di Piera by Marco Ferreri, Isabelle Huppert as the protagonist learns the part of Medea at school and plays it when she is an adult actress.
Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein adapted the plot for his 2000 film Such Is Life
Asian-American filmmaker Michael Justin Lee reinterpreted the story into a Film Noir short film set in modern-day America starring Amy Gordon as Medea. (2018)[33]

text: Television[edit]

text:
Australian actor Zoe Caldwell's performance in the 1982 Broadway adaptation[34] of the Jeffers' script[35] was recorded for broadcast
Lars von Trier made a version for television in 1988, based on the script adaptation by Carl Theodor Dreyer.
Theo van Gogh directed a miniseries version that aired 2005, the year following his murder.[36]
OedipusEnders, a documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 13 April 2010, discussed similarities between soap opera and Greek theatre. One interviewee revealed that the writers for the ITV police drama series The Bill had consciously and directly drawn on Medea in writing an episode for the series.[37]

text: Translations[edit]

text:
Edward P. Coleridge, 1891 – prose: full text[38]
Theodore Alois Buckley, 1892 – prose: full text[39]
Michael Woodhull, 1908 – verse
Gilbert Murray, 1912 – verse: full text[40]
Arthur S. Way, 1912 – verse
F. L. Lucas, 1924 – verse[41]
Augustus T. Murray, 1931 – prose
Countee Cullen, 1935
R. C. Trevelyan, 1939 – verse
Rex Warner, 1944 – verse
Peter D. Arnott, 1961 – verse
Philip Vellacott, 1963[42]
John Davie, 1996
James Morwood, 1997 – prose
Paul Roche, 1998 – verse
Ruby Blondell, 1999 – verse
George Theodoridis, 2004 – prose: full text[43]
Joseph Goodrich, 2005 – verse: full text[44]
Graham Kirby, 2006 – verse (The Bloomsbury Theatre)
Diane Arnson Svarlien, 2008 – verse
Robin Robertson, 2008 – verse
J. Michael Walton, 2008 – prose
Judith Mossman (classicist), 2011 - prose
Brian Vinero, 2012 – verse: full text[45]
Mike Bartlett, 2012 - play [46]
Diane Rayor, 2013
David Stuttard, 2014 – prose[47]
Alan Chriztopher R. Aranza, 2015 – prose