Many things have been said about WALL-E, the ninth installment from the Pixar Disney union and they’re all true. It’s an amazing representation of the future, bleak as it may be, fitting nicely in the pantheon of Sci-Fi. The first forty minutes are less like a cartoon, without dialogue or dance numbers from the good old days, and more like Anime than anything America has put out to date. Kids will be drawn to WALL-E’s cuteness while adults will identify with his (it’s?) geeky tendencies. WALL-E represents what people have wanted all along, not a human-like robot with features that remind us of ourselves, but a cute tin can that acts like us. He makes ‘goodness’ an evolutionary faction.
WALL-E is a robot who has been left on planet earth to do some heavy duty cleaning. He’s not the only robot, which the trailer leads you to believe, he’s merely the last functioning robot, and the movie never definitively explains why. This is an important factor in Sci-Fi, no-one can explain to us why LA looks like Tokyo’s long lost sister in Blade Runner, it just does. Allowing the viewer to come up with their own conclusions is what makes the genre interactive, a relationship which few studios are willing to entertain these days.
So WALL-E is alone with a cockroach for a buddy (who makes for some of the cutest jokes for those of you who have been confronted with their indestructibility) collecting trinkets from the mounds of trash he builds each day. When a new and flashy robot mysteriously shows up on earth he falls in love with her sleek features and laser toting abilities, putting an end to his loneliness.
When Eva goes into autopilot, WALL_E does everything he can to wake her up, but soon enough she is picked up by her chaperon rocket and taken back to a floating spaceship filled with fat people who haven’t walked in over two hundred years. (This is space remember.)
How do we know this? Because WALL-E is so taken with Eva that he grabs onto her recon vehicle and followers her, inevitably bringing enlightenment to the human race. This is where the movie disintegrates slightly. WALL-E isn’t heavy on plot and as the end approaches we begin to feel the effects, withdraws, of being away from that earth portion of the film.
These are my only two complaints. Plot and pity. Painstaking effort was made to anthropromorphise WALL-E into Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp but what we end up with is a Buster Keaton who is all pity. What was great about the Tramp was that he was an opportunist, he would steal, sneak and trick to get ahead. I felt so bad for WALL-E after twenty minutes that I never felt anything but that for the entire movie. He was almost too good natured, which in a fit of originality, is the exact opposite of what we’ve been taught to think about the evolution of the robot. I can’t blame viewers all over the world for crying for him, he’s effective.
It is highly recommended that one sees this movie in a theater. It will no doubt stand the test of time looking equally as crisp and expansive on home HD television sets, but it’s beauty shines most bright on the big screen. Like space, in it’s awesome and majestic glory, WALL-E is best experienced with a little imagination and a digital projector.
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