Posted on: July 6th, 2008 REVIEW: WALL-E
Take Johnny 5, Mac OS, and a lot of heart and what do you get?
You get WALL•E… the cutest little box this side of Miley Cyrus.
Ahem.
In all seriousness though, yes WALL•E as a character is sickeningly adorable every moment he’s on-screen, but it’s the masterful storytelling and film making that makes the newest Pixar film one of the best of its kind. To paraphrase Jeff Cannata’s review from Totally Rad Show Episode #67, WALL•E serves as a clinic to film makers everywhere on how to make an incredibly real movie. The irony there is that the movie is completely computer generated.
The story sings the song of family-friendly adventure-comedy meets classic sci-fi circa 1950-1970. The year is 2815 and earth has been abandoned of all human life. WALL•E, a little garbage compacting robot – the last of his kind or any other – is thrust into a planet-saving adventure when he is visited by EVE, a sleek, Appley, temptress of a robot.
I think WALL•E is a revolution in the “summer blockbuster” way of making film. For starters, the main character, one which will no doubt drive millions in merchandise sales, doesn’t talk. In fact… there’s not a whole lot of dialogue at all in this film, I’d say maybe four solid pages of actual spoken text. In the world of celebrity voices and guest cameos, that’s just insanity. In my mind I pictured a Hollywood fat-cat reading the first draft of this script, yelling and sputtering through a cigar, demanding more air-time for Ben Stiller or Jaime Foxx. But sure enough, Pixar didn’t take the path of least resistance and what we get is a film that not only has tremendous heart, but can be understood by anyone – the film breaks through language barriers and delivers a universal message.
Which brings me to my next point about WALL•E – I think the film marks Pixar growing up. Not so much in the sense of maturity, because all of Pixar’s films have been accessible to adults, but in the sense of that they’ve done everything superficially, and on the surface up until now. Pixar has proven that they are the best at what they do in terms of visuals and graphics and classic storytelling. But have any of the previous films really had a message? Most of their library’s core is not much more than that of an after-school special: acceptance, tolerance, the importance of family, yadda yadda yadda. But WALL•E is brave because it has an actual time-relevant message of gross commercialism mixed with An Inconvenient Truth and our rise to become the “Krispy Kreme generation”. While this certainly isn’t new in the realm of film (take the aforementioned Gore documentary, or Mike Judge’s Idiocracy for example), I’m pressed to think of another family summer blockbuster that puts the feelers out there like that. While its highly unlikely that the majority of the youth audience will even get the satire presented, the re-watchability and timelessness of Pixar’s films will make WALL•E a classic. In short, the film is damn smart.
I write as if the movie is this deep societal commentary, and that may turn you off. But don’t let it – these messages are snuck in ever so cleverly and we as an audience can look right past it if we want to. Make no mistake, that WALL•E first and foremost is a family-fun film, full of adventure, excitement, laughs, tears, Apple product placement, and the cutest little robot since R2-D2. In a market completely over-saturated with animated features, Pixar once again proves, appearing effortlessly, that they are king.