It is unfair to Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E that it has the burden of being the first Pixar release following last year’s nearly perfect Ratatouille (read my review from June 29, 2007). Unfair, because despite all efforts to isolate it and consider it on its own, I couldn’t help but feel some disappointment that WALL-E doesn’t quite achieve the standards established by that earlier film. However, it’s a disappointment that cannot be allowed to diminish its own achievement. After all, to say that Kobe Bryant is not as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan is not a failure.
WALL-E is a beautifully told simple story, wonderfully animated, with a great sense of humor. It just misses, though, on the deep emotional connection needed for the movie to really achieve orbit. It didn’t help that the movie started strong and then faded somewhat once the humans got involved in the story.
In an amazing challenge to Pixar’s animators, WALL-E takes the approach of The Black Stallion and spends the first 30 minutes or so with hardly a word of dialogue. Deprived of the “crutch” of voice actors, they have to put everything on the screen. They introduce us to WALL-E (short for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter · Earth-Class), the last trash compacting robot functioning on an Earth long abandoned by humans. His sole companion as he goes about his task is a resilient but silent cockroach, and WALL-E augments his janitorial tasks by sifting through the detritus of human civilization for artifacts that interest him. Chief among them is a videotape of Hello Dolly, the soundtrack of which he plays constantly.
©Disney/Pixar
While watching WALL-E go about his content if lonely existence, some mysteriously functional billboards intrude on the silence to provide some unnecessary exposition. It is revealed that unchecked consumerism and corporate greed has rendered Earth a cesspit. Eventually the entire world economy—and government—merged into a single corporate structure called Buy n Large (BnL).
With life on Earth increasingly disgusting, BnL builds giant space cruise ships to house the world’s population for a five-year cruise to outer space while its robots are left to clean up the mess. It is in these billboards and commercials that Andrew Stanton made a very interesting choice of the first (I believe) live action performance in a Pixar movie. BnL CEO Shelby Forthright is played by Fred Willard—and I don’t mean “voiced by Fred Willard.” Willard actually appears as a live person several times during the movie. It’s definitely an edgy decision and not one that I’m sure completely paid off.
The mundane life of WALL-E gets disrupted, though, when a spaceship lands nearby and drops off an Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator probe robot. EVE (voiced minimally by Elissa Knight) is all sleek curves and serious firepower, and of course lonely WALL-E falls immediately in love. Love generally happens too quickly in movies, but somehow with robots it works fine. Even when as oddly inefficient as the robots generally are in this movie, it just seems right that they’d make all decisions—even emotional ones—immediately. Slowly, WALL-E gains EVE’s attention and wins her over.
This first act of the movie is simply exquisite. But when WALL-E’s newfound companionship is put in peril by the spaceship’s return for its probe, the movie also loses something as well. With the story’s departure from Earth and flight to Axiom, BnL’s human spaceship, the tone changes from pastoral beauty to a pretty standard series of chase action sequences. Don’t get me wrong, everything is still done at a very high caliber. It’s just that over the next hour my emotional investment slowly bled away. I blame the humans.
©Disney/Pixar
It turns out that what was initially supposed to be a 5-year cruise while the planet was cleaned has since morphed into a 700-year permanent existence, with everybody barely remembering Earth even exists. With technology providing every possible convenience, humanity now lives a life of sloth and has fattened into immobile marshmallow-people (it is perhaps telling of how this part of the story has been underplayed by Disney that none of the 30 official publicity photographs for the movie show any of the humans).
The general response I’m seeing in the media to this has been to view it as an indictment of bald consumerism. But it isn’t—consumerism requires an economy, and this ship has none. Nobody works to earn so they can buy. Instead, it is an indictment of the mental and physical coma induced by a culture of perpetual video entertainment: Consumerism and corporate indifference may have made Earth unlivable, but moving pictures kept the populace distracted so that it could happen.
Some interesting questions are raised by what we see of human life aboard the ship. And there is a very interesting parallel among the robots, with those showing individuality being treated as insane. Ultimately though, these ideas and questions just tantalize us, dancing at the edge of the screen and not given any kind of full treatment, and the end result leaves the audience with a feeling of incompleteness.
The movie concludes with the WALL-E/EVE love story sharing narrative importance with the fate of the humans on the ship, but not enough time is spent establishing the existence of the humans beyond having morphed into giant marshmallows eating liquid cupcakes from Big Gulp cups. Another 10 to 15 minutes fleshing out (quite literally) the human side of the story would have been most welcome.
Three humans provide pretty much the only real voicework in the movie. The ship’s captain is voiced by the gruff but immediately lovable Jeff Garlin. John Ratzenberger joins Kathy Najimy as one of two humans whose idyll is disrupted by WALL-E and have begun noticing the real world around them when forced to look away from their video monitors. Sigourney Weaver voices the ship’s computer, though I have to honestly say that I have no idea what lines she spoke. Otherwise, the voices heard are computer-generated, most prominently the voice of Auto, the ship’s autopilot, voiced by Apple’s Macintalk software.
Despite my strong preference for the visual artistry of the first half of the movie, children will probably really dig into the movie in the second half when the pace really picks up and the sight gags fly fast and furious. There are, of course, no scenes or themes that are inappropriate for children (unless you’re offended by environmental messages and the idea that watching video monitors 24/7 is bad for you) and what violence does occur is mostly robots versus robots.
©Disney/Pixar
Warning again that I may be unfairly demeriting WALL-E for being next after Ratatouille, I must say that this isn’t Pixar’s best effort. But it is right up there with Finding Nemo, Andrew Stanton’s last film.
There are no special reveals or spoilers after the end credits, but unless your children are wriggling loose, you might want to stay to the very end to see light storytelling and pixelated animation during the end credits.
Showing with WALL-E is a new Pixar short called “Presto.” It is a gag-filled short telling the story of a magician’s rabbit deprived of his dinner before a show. Revenge is had.
There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about this short but it is fun, so make sure you’re in your seats and don’t show up late.
WALL-E is a Disney/Pixar release (promotional material and movie logo uses WALL·E with a dot in place of the hyphen)
- Wide release on Friday, June 27, 2008
- Directed by Andrew Stanton
- Screenplay by Andrew Stanton
- Starring: Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Nijimy, Sigourney Weaver
- Rated G
- Runtime: 103 minutes
- Alex’s Rating: 8 out of 10
