My grandmother Leona Booth lived long and festered. In her forties, she began uttering vague threats that “Jesus will be coming for me soon,” and “You won’t have me to kick around much longer,” and “I’ll never make old bones.” In her seventies, she continuously threatened to stop taking her medications and start taking the bus downtown to buy marijuana for her glaucoma and arthritis. In her eighties, after the death of her lifelong friend Bernice, with whom she made an annual pilgrimage to Reno for gambling, she told me that longevity was God’s way of punishing women. As if the agony and gore of childbirth were insufficient. In her nineties, the last time I saw her alive, she said, “I really could have done without these last ten years.” 

Animation leaves a substantial footprint in the ecological sand, with greenhouse gases and waste products produced from labyrinthine supply chains, at every stage of production. Using Pixar’s Wall-E (2008) as a case study, what follows is an examination of methodologies and considerations in assessing environmental impacts in the preproduction, production, postproduction and dissemination of animated films.