Waldo, the New Face of Politics

Waldo, the amazingly funny but explicit animated blue bear, clashes onto the scene of politics in the town of Stentonford to make a difference in their government, or was he? While I was watching this film from The Black Mirror television series, I found it very amusing yet strange that an animation could easily win the crowd over. Because of that, it had me questioning our humanity as a whole. Why is it that something so physically inhuman can easily convince a human being? Seeing that as technology evolves rapidly over time, our need for it increases dramatically; it has gotten to the point that technology is actually a part of us in a biological sense that we cannot live without it so easily. Going back to the film, I was truly shocked of the fact that Waldo had no political background yet somehow managed to join as a candidate for an election and managed to get a great amount of popular votes in a short amount of time. All he did was threw massive slander towards the other candidates, especially at Liam Monroe, the leading candidate for the Conservative party.

Based on the events in this film, I came to the conclusion that this film is clearly a satire toward elections in general, expressing that we, the people, tend to make ignorant and irrational decisions due to entertainment despite of how serious the matter is. In relation to the film, people pretty much knew that Waldo was not going to win the election mainly because he is just an animation but the fact that he was so entertaining and uncensored, people deeply considered him human enough to earn their respect. This moment highly correlates to the Uncanny Valley because Waldo is a cartoon with human capabilities that people did not find revolting. I even learned that you do not have to be a politician to join an election campaign and possibly win it.

I can see how our election this year is similar to this one. Although there was no animated character running for president this year, some people made their views on it very creative. Take this picture below for example. People would rather vote for a dead gorilla to be president of the United States than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. "The poll also shows that, while voters aren’t exactly going ape for Harambe, they don’t hate him as much as they hate Trump and Clinton," says the New York Daily News in their article Harambe the dead gorilla would fare well as independent presidential candidate, poll says (link provided down below). Just as in The Waldo Moment, the conservatives counteracted towards this ideal of 2016 presidency the harshest out of all parties. Sad to say, we did not take this year's election serious to where as we fully recognized the major impacts that this could cause upon us and the country. I mean, if we had invested our votes into actual candidates who could have possibly made a huge difference towards our country in the future instead of these "witty titles," then maybe the election would have been affected differently now.




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/harambe-gorilla-presidential-candidate-poll-article-1.2733080