Greenpeace Adopts WALL•E for Forests Campaign

[Norwesterner]

Well, it had to happen sooner or later . . . WALL•E goes political!

I got an email alert this morning that Greenpeace has crafted a campaign using WALL•E to protest Kimberley-Clark coming out with a line of WALL•E Kleenex™, which while it comes in a container using recycled paper content, the tissues themselves, Greenpeace claims, come directly from 100+ year-old trees clear-cut from Old Growth Forests.

Greenpeace has developed an animated counterpart to WALL•E called KLEER•E (short for Kleenex clear-cutting forests), and called the campaign Iron•E to denote how Kimberley-Clark is apparently ironically capitalizing on the environmental attraction of WALL•E in an un-environmental way.

You can take a look at the main issue page (and a pretty clever 2-D animated video parody . . . showing what WALL•E could look like as a conventional Saturday morning cartoon) at:

www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/wall-e-kleenex-iron-e

I'm still weighing the charges and evidence myself, but it's interesting!

[Callandor]

Ahahahahahahahahahhahahaha that was great!!! Like omg, hahaha, thanks for showing me that that was awsome

[Khodhum]

Wow...I found myself laughing in spite of how kind of messed up that is.

[MidgardDragon]

Meh, I was hoping we'd see some environmentalist group adopt the green leaf logo, but I'm not too happy with this.

[fastdash9]

I thought they were going to use the environmental theme of the movie for their campaign, but this was not what I expected...

I do like the cartoon though, especially the end where WALL-E is being chased

[vanessajoyce]

I'm assuming they secured the proper rights from Disney to use one of their licensed character in this film?

[Norwesterner]

Probably not, as I believe such use of characters as this (as well as songs) are covered under the fair use and parody provisions of US copyright and intellectual property regulations.

I could be wrong, but I believe those regs allow such use of proprietary characters as presented here. It would be better if Greenpeace did work constructively with Disney, but it's my assumption that Disney would not endorse or officially cooperate with a campaign such as this Greenpeace effort. I can almost guarantee though that such an organization as Greenpeace would not post a web page or campaign such as this if it wasn't legal for them, one way or another, to do so.

[vanessajoyce]

Well, I personally wouldn't call this "fair use." Fair use laws are pretty specific and this doesn't jive with them at all. If I owned a character, I would be upset with this -- no matter whether I agreed with the message or not.

But I guess that's for Disney lawyers to decide . . . and they certainly do know how to earn their money.

[buynlarge]

"Let's use an environment-friendly cartoon character to advertise destroying forests!"

What moron came up with this bright idea?