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+
