Movie Analysis

Richard Tyler Hoback

UKC 100-001           

3/6/2014

Movie Analysis

            During the week of February 24, 2014, we watched three movies that all had to do with design.  The three movies that we watched were Helvetica, Monuments Men, and Disney’s Wall-e.  All of these movies had some things in common.  Helvetica was all about the typeface, Helvetica, and how it’s created and used in everyday life.  Monuments Men is about these men who travel Europe to find the treasure that the Nazis stole and hid during the World War II era.  Disney’s, Wall-e, is all about this little robot on earth and him, unknowingly, bringing the humans back to Earth.  They may sound like they have nothing at all in common, however, the one thing they all do have is design.  Design is everywhere in these movies, from the lighting of the scenes, to the story behind it all.

            Helvetia, the movie, is all about the typeface, Helvetica.  Helvetica is the most commonly used typeface in the world.  In Helvetica, they show us how the typeface is created and distributed everywhere.  There are people in the world whose job it is to create different typefaces and make them better.  These people’s titles are Topologists and they live to design typefaces.  They have designed Helvetica and it became the most commonly used typeface in the world because of its simplicity and because of how easy it is to read and produce.  The type is used everywhere in the world from advertisements to documents.

            Instead of Everything is Illuminated, I watched Monuments Men.  Monuments Men is a true story about a group of people who go on a hunt around Europe to find the treasure and artwork that Hitler and the Nazis stole from the Jews and hid for themselves because they didn’t want the west to find it.  One way there is design in this movie is, obviously, from the artwork that they are trying to recover.  The artwork they are looking for is some of the best work in the world and is very valuable.  Also, they were traveling all across Europe, so they showed the big landmarks that each place is known for.  They spent years looking for the artwork that the Nazis hid and the Nazis destroyed some of it and hid the rest in places like mines, that they thought no one would ever look in.

            In Disney’s, Wall-e, all of the humans have left the Earth after thousands of years of trash covering the Earth and the big cities.  Wall-e is a robot that was created to stay behind and clean up the trash but after so many years, Wall-e is the only one left because all of the other ones broke down.  After awhile, the humans, who live in space now, send a robot back to Earth to look for any kind of life, like trees or grass.  This robot is names Eve and she meets Wall-e and he shows her the plant that he had found just a couple days before she came down to Earth.  It is up to them to get it back to the captain of the ship in space and let them know that its okay to come back to Earth.  Design is in this movie from creating the visual of the earth being covered in trash, to the way that the people out in space move around on their little hover chairs so they do not have to walk.  There is also a special case of design in this movie that most movies do not have.  The main characters don’t really talk.  The two robots can really only say each others names so you have to really pay attention to the design and the detail of what is going on to understand what is going on in the movie.

            The overall theme that all of these movies have in common, is design.  However, when you look deeper, they all are related to each other in some way. All three movies used the typeface Helvetica in them.  All Three movies had one main goal that they achieved in the films. In Helvetica, they strived to create the best typeface ever.  In Monuments Men, they searched Europe to find treasure that had been hidden for years.  And in Wall-e, Wall-e and Eve tried to save the humans and let them be able to come back to Earth.  However, they all differed immensely.  Helvetica took place in present time, it is going on right now.  Monuments Men took place many years ago and it involved things from the Nazi era.  Wall-e took place many, many years in the future when the world was uninhabited.

            What I took away from this is that you can find design everywhere.  Everything in movies is all about the design, from the lighting to the story line, to the way they characters talk and act.  It all tells a story in a different way.  Some of it is very informative and some is just amusing to see and watch.  Design is literally everywhere and is involved with everything.