I don't usually do this, but I was scanning back-posts at my Journalscape blog and found this long-ish review of the Pixar movie WALL-E that I wrote on July 9, 2008 and thought I'd repost it here in its entirety. So go ahead and read on if you're interested in my take on that movie back when it came out...
I took my two boys to see the newest Disney-Pixar movie,
WALL-E, yesterday afternoon. I was expecting to be as charmed by it as I
have been by most of the previous Pixar films, including such offerings
as CARS, FINDING NEMO, TOY STORY (1 and 2), and RATATOUILLE.
And I think WALL-E was as good as those movies (and maybe better in a
lot of ways), but not nearly as charming. I don't know how to explain
it...I think those other stories all take the Disney formula (if you
don't know that formula, no sense in trying to explain it) and used it
with their own unique twists. And they've worked, so much so that they
are really the class of Disney animation currently, and have been for a
long time, since the days of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN.
But - it's a much more complicated story than any of those. It's
FAR less happy than any of them, far less funny, and more touching in a
lot of ways. It's also more of a dystopian SF adventure than anything
I've seen previously done by Disney. (I wonder what that will mean to
repeat business for this film - while I liked it, I can't see going back
to the theater to see it with the kids like we have done for other
Pixar films...)
(THIS SYNOPSIS LIKELY CONTAINS SPOILERS - READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...)
In case you don't know, Wall-E is a little robot whose name is an
acronym (exactly for what, I can't remember-waste allocation something
something - Earth). He's the last one of his kind to still be
operational, to still be functioning in his task to clean up the waste
and garbage left on the planet by humans as they've abandoned their
planet for a life in space. He's a fairly low-tech looking thing, yet
he has intelligence and self-awareness. He is lonely, as you might
expect, with only a cockroach as company for who knows how many of the
last 700 years. Yet he goes about his tasks diligently, compacting and
stacking trash into skyscraper sized piles all around the city.
Into this world comes EVE, a sleek "female" robot whose "directive"
is classified. Fortunately for Wall-E, she doesn't vaporize him
immediately (I wondered about her defensive responses - was she
programmed to find monsters on Earth? Why is she so quick to shoot
first at anything that moves?) and after he follows her around for a
long time, the pair of robots fall in "love", or something like love at
least.
When Wall-E is showing her his treasures, artifacts from humanity's
past that he's collected in his day to day toils, he presents her with
something different - something he hasn't come across in a long time. A
small living plant. EVE's response is dramatic. She seizes the small
plant, places it inside of her metallic body, and goes into a sort of
catatonia. On her body a green leaf flashes over and over. And sure
enough, soon the ship that left her comes to collect her, and she is
being delivered to wherever she came from originally. And of course,
Wall-E can't let her go like that; he chases her down and ends up going
on a trip through outer space to her final destination: the star
cruiser Axiom with its cargo of humanity.
And herein lies more dystopian elements. Humanity has changed - low
gravity and a life of leisure has turned them into a bunch of lazy
blobs who are content to be waited on hand and foot by their robot
tenders and don't even think about life or interaction with each other.
Their captain is a pleasant but seemingly not too "bright" blob voiced
by John Goodman. (John Ratzenberger makes his usual appearance as a
passenger who is forced to interact with others by Wall-E's intrusion
into their daily existence.) The Buy-N-Large Corporation is the
benefactor in all of this - the corporation is the entity that built the
robots, that sent humans into space to live while Earth is supposedly
being cleaned up, and that promoted this lifestyle in the first place - a
sort of bad guy who isn't really even there anymore.
Of course, Wall-E and EVE save the day, getting the plant to the
proper place which results in the ship returning to Earth, against heavy
resistance from the robots who now seem to embody the Corporation.
It's a touching conclusion at times, watching the humans get back on
their feet, literally and figuratively, and relearn the joys of living,
as the captain watches Wall-E and EVE dance through the space around the
ship, and as the passengers are forced to interact with each other and
simply act to save themselves. The captain outwits his robot overseer
in the end, and humans return to Earth, which is not really "ready" to
receive them but which needs their attention to be reborn. All very
optimistic, at the end, and positive.
It's a cautionary tale, however, warning against a lot of things -
not the least of which is excessive consumption, corporate greed and a
trend toward indoor (computers, video games, big screen tvs, etc.)
entertainment vs outdoor activity. It seems to warn against
technological achievement just for the sake of achievement, with no
attention to the good or bad results of such achievement. Maybe most of
all it warns against the current trend of not looking beyond tomorrow.
I think there are some heavy social and political themes buried in the
cartoon medium within which director Andrew Stanton and Pixar work best.
Probably a lot more of them than I'm getting to here...I think someone
could expand on a lot of these things and dig far deeper into this
story than I've done.
And that, by itself, is very unusual for a Disney or a Pixar type
story. So, while WALL-E is not nearly as charming or uplifting as other
Disney fare, it is certainly deeper and more socially aware than almost
anything they've done in this medium to date.
I probably won't see it again in the theater, but will likely buy it
when it finally comes out on DVD, and I'm thinking I'll enjoy it then,
too. Meanwhile...I'll just have to content myself with playing the
Wall-E video game with my sons...;-)
*****
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DOING DISNEY, available for Amazon Kindle at $2.99. Thanks!
*****
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