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WALL-E Review

Movie Reviews

Release Date: June 27, 2008
Studio: Walt Disney Pictures • Pixar
MPAA Rating: G
Genre: Fantasy • Family • Animated
Director: Andrew Stanton
Writers: Andrew Stanton, Jim Capobianco
Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy
Synopsis: Pixar and Disney come together again to tell the story of WALL•E, a brave little toaster of a robot programmed to clean up the remains of the planet earth, how he falls in love and his adventures to infinity and beyond.
The Review: At last, my love has come along/
My lonely days are over/
And life is like a song/
Oh, yeah, at last/
The skies above are blue*

WALL•E is the ninth annual Pixar/Disney release and possibly their best film yet.
The incredibly simple story is the tale of how the last surviving Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class or WALL•E robot, falls in love.

Despite the simplistic G-rated structure, the film manages to touch on such grown-up themes as consumer culture, our willingness to allow the exploitation of the planet by mega corporations, our apathy over the influence our own actions have on the future of our civilization, our over-reliance on technology, and our need to remain over-stimulated at all times.

WALL•E is the last working robot on the Earth. He’s not entirely alone, as he’s accompanied by his buddy Hal, a spunky cockroach. Following his programming, he’s been cleaning our planet for about 700 years (700 years from the not too distant future is the impression I got).

His fellow WALL•E units have all bit the dust. Left to his own devices (and some measure of A.I.), he has become quite the collector of interesting artifacts, including an iPod, and an ancient videotape of Hello Dolly.
Somewhere within his little robotic body, the droid has developed a longing, a loneliness, an awareness that there is something more out there than simply doing his job.
That something arrives one fine day in the form of EVE -a streamlined, sleek, gleaming white robot that can fly. It’s obvious she’s looking for something, but we don’t know what.

And this is where the love story begins. I’m not going to delve too much into the story because WALL•E is the kind of movie that should be savored as it unfolds. A fairy tale for the new millennium, it stops just short of beginning “Once upon a time….” The adventure itself is sparked by the love story, as adventure so often is.

Have I mentioned that the film thus far is 99.99% dialogue-free? With the exception of a few holographic billboards, scenes from HELLO DOLLY and a live-action (!) video message from SHELBY FORTHRIGHT-CEO of BuyNLarge , the only corporation on Earth, the movie has been nothing but WALL•E talking to himself.

If you’re concerned that you or your kids might not understand the little guy, don’t worry- WALL•E is voiced by STAR WARS sound designer god Ben Burtt. He’s the guy who made R2-D2 talk,so he really knows how to artificially convey emotions and attitudes with sound effects.

WALL•E’s vision of the future is the anti-Star Trek. Sure, humanity made it to the stars in a gleaming spaceship, but any similarity ends there.

This craft, intriguingly named AXIOM**, is a luxury liner, and instead of “ boldly going where no person has yadda yadda yadda’d ” the AXIOM’s humans are descendents of the original luxury liners relaxing passengers, and have devolved into large, nearly boneless parasites, spending their days on floating Laz-E-Boyz recliners, sipping all of their meals through a straw.

This particular plot point has created controversy among some viewers. Here it is in a nutshell: Is Pixar/Disney drawing a correlation between fat and the horrendous future they present as a possibilty for mankind? Are they saying that fat people are bad?

It seems to me that the filmmakers are making more than one point here. One idea is that Buy N Large created a community that became a slave to their corporate culture, and mankind became the ultimate consumer. Another thought is that on the Axiom, the computers ruled everything, and it eventually got to the point where the people merely became part of the works. We are given to understand that the ancestors (not obese, necessarily) of the people on the Axiom were certainly accomplices to the dark fate of the planet, as it was clearly the result of good old fashioned corporate greed.

But this is not the crime of the passengers themselves. The obesity, and let us not forget major bone loss, are presented as the results of centuries of apathy. In my opinion, there was no insinuation that fat guys=bad guys.

There certainly is a moral to the story here. Every day we make choices-every time we toss a recyclable into the nearby garbage as a means of avoiding those few extra steps to rinse and recycle, every time we purchase overly packaged products that we simply don’t need from corporations who are willing to cut employees before cutting their bottom line, every time we take an extra spin around the parking lot for a closer space.

WALL•E challenges us to think about those things:to contemplate our options, to consider the consequences of our actions, however innocent they may seem. What it comes down to is this: are we going to use technology, or are we going to let technology, and those who control it, use us?

Since this is a Disney movie, there are some issues which are never fully examined: we see a nursery with babies but there’s no mention of reproduction/procreation or even physical interaction. Maybe the babies are simply created via genetics (or a Matrix-esque baby farm perhaps?) as insurance that there will continue to be consumers - one more cog in the machine, right? Not to mention, there are babies … and grownups. No old people, no teenagers, no kids.

But I digress.
Written and directed by Andrew Stanton (writer of, well, nearly everything Pixar), the story of WALL•E is as beautiful as the film’s visuals-even the garbaged landscapes are stunning.

The digital cinematography by the team of Lasky, Feinberg and Jonsson (with an uncredited assist from the Cohen brothers favorite director of photography Roger Deakins) makes WALL•E look at times like a single camera documentary and other times like footage 2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY.
If you’re interested, there’s a great featurette online called “Pixar Goes Space Age” available throughout the internet that details Mr. Deakins’ involvement with this Pixar project.

The voice cast includes Elissa Knight (Tia in CARS), Jeff Garlin ("Curb Your Enthusiasm" ), Sigourney Weaver as The Axiom’s computer, Pixar’s good luck charm John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy and MacInTalk (the text-to-speech program that shipped with the fist Macintosh computer in 1984) as Auto,the Axiom’s autopilot.

And WALL•E himself turns in a matchless performance. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go to his metal head like some robots we’ve watched fall victim to the plagues of success in the past (we all remember what happened to “Small Wonder’s” Vicki).
May there be nothing but future carpets of red and beds of roses for our intrepid little friend!

WALL•E is a wonderful, deceptively simple movie. Intricately layered with warnings and predictions, funny and sweet, it is, at its digital heart, a love story. WALL•E is a sure addition to our toy boxes, joining the likes of Buzz Lightyear, Stitch and Sully & Mike.

This is one of those movies that everyone in the audience will enjoy (even holding the attention of a rambunctious toddler or two). So sit back, laugh, cry – and look for a place to recycle your popcorn containers on the way out of the theatre. That’s when the work begins.

*At Last
Lyrics by Etta James
**ax·i·om -from Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) [ak-see-uhm]
–noun
1. a self-evident truth that requires no proof.
2. a universally accepted principle or rule.
3. Logic, Mathematics. a proposition that is assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow from it.
Rating: 5 out of 5

Keyword Search:

Pixar Andrew Stanton Ben Burtt Elissa Knight Jeff Garlin Fred Willard John Ratzenberger Kathy Najimy Sigourney Weaver MacInTalk

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