Pixar’s streak of movies that are both innovative and commercially successful is unreal. They are the Beatles of animation and WALL-E is their Sergeant Pepper’s. Like that defining concept album, WALL-E experiments with narrative and point of view in ways you have never seen in computer animation. The film operates with very little dialogue; visual clues, and clever slapstick fill in where exposition and fast talking celebrity cameos were before.
But mainly, it’s a movie about adorable robots in love. The treatment of animated characters as emotionally complicated beings is Pixar’s gene for success and WALL-E is no exception. WALL-E collects trash from an abandoned world and through his curious interactions with everyday items, we know him. Its hard to resist a robot who uses a film canister as a top hat and dances along to a discarded Barbra Streisand musical. Most importantly, the love between WALL-E and the i-podesque EVE is unorthodox and touching.
Ok, so I know I’m gushing a bit, but this movie makes you feel great. I guess if I really thought about it hard, I might complain that the themes of environmentalism and anti-wal-martism were a little simplified but this is an unabashedly romantic film and hell, maybe love is all you need.
Grade: A+
1 comment:
Although I could have watched the two robots frolic about a dead earth for an entire movie, I loved its spin on the suggestion of what mankind may be coming to. As it turns out, "cute" can go a long way in making a serious statement. Typical scary futures depict humans as coldly efficient and technologically advanced, with lack of emotion and creative thought indicating grave errors in the past and the current population’s inevitable downfall. WALL-E doesn’t even give us that much credit—-fast forward 700 years and man has only managed to build a better super mall and eliminate the need to chew. They literally can’t get up off their own asses, but even their kind of corpulence is innocuously smooth and squishy, inciting pity rather than repugnance.
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