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Jeff Garlin
Andrew Stanton
Sigourney Weaver
Wall•E
(2008)
It's best not to ask too many questions during Wall•E, the new CGI-animated comedy from Pixar. Take the film's outstretched hand and go with it. That's the best way to enjoy a film that's as charming as a tale of two robots falling in love can be. Which, as it turns out, is pretty darn charming. As written and directed by Andrew Stanton (with co-writer Jim Reardon from a story by Stanton and Pete Docter), Wall•E develops some familiar themes of animated and science-fiction films, but the combination of elements results in a unique film. Like most heroes of children's films, Wall•E yearns for something more—but unlike those characters, Wall•E is a robot, and someone else is singing his song.
The story is best enjoyed as an unfolding narrative, so I'll tread gently on the plot. Wall•E (a.k.a. Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last robot on Earth, cleaning up the mess we're making now. It's an Earth with skyscrapers constructed of compacted garbage cubes, and the little robot is plodding away through the ongoing task, crushing and placing one garbage cube at a time. But sometime over the last 700 years, Wall•E not only became alone in his task, but began to develop an interest in the garbage, collecting from the detritus of civilization intriguing knick-knacks for himself: a lightbulb, a Rubik's Cube, a spork. That's right: just like us, this robot is baffled by sporks.
What caused the robot's presumable evolution from drone to a more developed and discriminating artificial intelligence is never addressed, but the key to "his" "humanity" is his prized piece of junk: a VHS tape of 1969's Hello Dolly! Over and over again, the little robot studies the emotions and gestures of its human characters, who stroll, dance, hold hands, and sing about a place that's "Out there, full of shine and sparkle" where there's "adventure in the evening air/Girls in white in a perfumed night/Where the lights are bright as the stars." The recycled musical yearning cleverly lends the film conventional wistfulness in an unconventional way.
Wall•E's routine is disrupted when another robot, named EVE, arrives on a secret mission and, well, sparks fly. Where their journey together takes them is best left to your own enjoyment of the film, but we do learn more about what's happened to humanity, and the conception of where our sorry butts end up is one I've long longed to see in a science-fiction comedy. The filmmakers overtly acknowledge the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (one robot in the film is specifically designed to resemble HAL 9000's evil eye—cue the "Blue Danube Waltz"), and internet wags have commented on Wall•E's resemblance to Number 5 from Short Circuit, but the most interesting resemblance is to the "B" Ark plot thread from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
The animation and script are typically top-notch, as is the Pixar hallmark (but, again, don't ask questions like where the other thousand Wall•Es wound up, or whether the ending is a good idea—it’s emotionally right). Part of the genius of the film is purely technical: the use of greater photo-real techniques for the dusty landscapes, "shot" by the animators and their tools with purposely imperfect "lighting" and "focus" (reported advisors include visual effects pioneer Dennis Muren and photographers Roger Deakins and Harris Savides). The MVP is Ben Burtt, the legendary sound designer known especially for the robot voices in the Star Wars saga. Burtt does the key vocal work for the film, which spends a large chunk of its running time in an essentially dialogue-less mode familiar from Pixar shorts and silent films. (Another country heard from: Peter Gabriel, who co-wrote the song "Down to Earth" with composer Thomas Newman.)
Best of all, the film has a social conscience, with the demise of Earth largely credited to a single corporation ("Buy n Large") that swallowed the global economy whole. A world full of "stuff" winds up looking eerily desolate, including a disused-satellite ring-around-the-collar for the planet. There's a good balance here of pessimism about humanity that's ultimately rewarded by optimism, though what the film is especially optimistic about is robots, all of which develop suspiciously human emotions on the way to romance, saving a day, and perhaps—irony of ironies!— teaching humans to be more human. For a movie about precision mechanics, this one's likeably offbeat.
(The feature is preceded, as is Pixar's custom, with another boffo animated short: "Presto." It's a ridiculously entertaining five minutes about a magician feuding with his rabbit. Don't be late for the movie!)
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