[Movie Review] WALL-E
AWWWWWWWWW! Seriously. AWW. This could very well be the cutest movie that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some cute crap. Pixar’s latest example of their superiority, WALL-E, made a killing over the weekend in the States, and I expect that fantastic word of mouth could carry it through the rest of the summer. All the hype that you’ve heard is 100% correct. It’s a fantastic film.
The movie centers around a robot by the name of WALL-E, a trash-collector left on Earth to clean up our mess. See, we’ve junked up the place so badly in the future that we’ve abandoned it for a plush spread in outer space. WALL-E seems to enjoy his job, particularly in the finding of random knick-knacks like a Rubik’s cube and a brassiere, but the little guy is painfully lonely. His cockroach pal is his only friend. The movie does a GREAT job of setting up WALL-E’s loneliness during this section of the film. He’s got no dialogue, sort of like the beginning of There Will Be Blood, and it works just as masterfully as it did for that film. You really appreciate the work that Pixar put into giving the little guy so much personality with not so much as a word of dialogue spoken. He cleans up our mess and returns to a little shelter where he watches old VHS tapes of musicals and longs for companionship. That wish is granted with the arrival of the sleek EVE, a female robot in search of…
Well, I’ll leave that for you to discover. I went into this movie fairly blind, and it helped my enjoyment of the film tremendously. What I will tell you is that the evolution of the relationship between WALL-E and EVE is some of the most touching stuff ever committed to film, and I say that with zero exaggeration. That scene where he takes her to his home and shows off his pad is a CLASSIC scene. SO cute and endearing, and keep in mind, they barely talk other than saying each other’s names, yet I got more emotion from them than from any film I’ve seen this year. It’s just mind-boggling to me that Pixar was able to pull this off.
Needless to say, EVE is summoned away, and WALL-E cannot bear the thought of losing his beloved, and hitches a ride on her spaceship. It is here that film takes what could have been a potentially fatal turn by introducing human characters. I was so enjoying watching these two robots together that having a bunch of people sudenly running around was jarring and had the risk of clogging up the screen. To some extent, they do. There’s a subplot concerning the state of humanity in the future, but to be honest, I didn’t care about them. I was emotionally invested in WALL-E and EVE, and these people were doing nothing but taking screentime away from them. It’s not that the storyline is awful, but I just found it to be incredibly superfluous. Without getting into specifics, I began to wonder if Al Gore had written this movie, because the subplot reeks of An Inconvenient Truth, but if that is what it takes to get kids to clean up after themselves, so be it, I suppose.
Another (minute) criticism of the film is the minor robot characters that are introduced. This is going to directly contradict what I said above, but I actually wanted to see more of these characters, particularly one germophobic robot that had me in stitches. These characters were actually a lot of fun without detracting from the WALL-E/EVE story, and I wish I’d had a WEE bit more time with them, but they were still a fun addition. It was so adorable to see how WALL-E’s presence affected and changed all of them. The force of his sweet personality changes them and actually gives them personality. Perhaps my favorite bit of the film involves a mechanical robot who uses its arms merely to type. WALL-E waves to the robot, and for the first time, the robot realizes that it can do something other than an assigned task, and happily waves back at WALL-E. It’s a quick moment, but I found it to be incredibly powerful. The entire film is filled with messages about going outside the lines of authority and making your own way, and I found that the film handled this beautifully.
And speaking of beautiful, the animation in this is simply gorgeous. GORGEOUS. WALL-E’s eyes have so much emotive power. Just looking at the little guy made me well up with tears, particularly during the final scene in this movie that brought the house down. I kid you not, the entire theater, children and parents alike, were WEEPING uncontrollably at one point and then SCREAMING and CHEERING with joy the next. Just a fantastic, fantastic scene that still puts tears in my eyes as I type about it now.
Overall, the movie does have minor, minor issues that I didn’t like. The humans play a role in the film, but I just didn’t care about them. I wish I’d seen more of the other robots, but overall, these things aren’t even enough for me to deduct from the rating of this film. It is simply a masterpiece, the best film of the year so far, and is thisclose to usurping The Lion King as my favorite animated film of all time. And if you know me, you know that it would take a giant to dethrone that film in my eyes. Or maybe, a little robot with a giant heart.
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7 Responses to “[Movie Review] WALL-E”
**** this movie.
I’ll see it eventually.
Blimey. After the massively overrated Ratatouille was planning on giving this one a wide berth. Might just have to reconsider on the strength of this review..
Saw a preview at Glastonbury. Wow. The trailers didn’t give me much hope for it and I was completely suprised by how good it was. Seriously, one of if not the best movie Pixar has made, and given Pixar’s pedigree that is really something not to be said lightly. Visually beautiful, and I cared more about the love story of these two robots more than I did about so many humans in other movies.
While I see the reviewer’s point about the humans distracting from the robots who I’d have happily watched for the whole film, I don’t see that storyline as overly preachy, and the humans came across far more sympathetically than I expected – like children used to a way of life, rather than big bad consumers.
Forget Best Animated Picture, this needs to get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
I found Ratatouile to be INCREDIBLY overrated as well. This film is ten times the film that Ratatouille was.
Wall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80’s style of course
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