Quirkee.com

WALL-E (2008) Director - Andrew Stanton; Starring - Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver; Screenplay - Andrew Stanton; Rated G; see trailer here.

How strange is it that a movie can in the space of two hours elicit thoughts of both Stanley Kubrick and Michael Bay? Both for good and ill considerations? And that those impressions are spawned by a children's film from Disney?

Yes, WALL-E spawned that kind of confused assessment from me. Sometimes it really is that much a pain in the ass to be as much a film geek as I am.

I have been a big Pixar booster since the first Toy Story. I remember my skepticism and disdain for the notion of a computer generated animated film being replaced with absolute wonder when I first entered the world of Woody the Cowboy and Buzz Lightyear. I have to believe the feeling was akin to that people had when seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the first time. I knew I was witnessing something truly revolutionary.

Since that time, Pixar has churned out both amazing family adventures (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) and solid if unspectacular romps (A Bug's Life, Cars). The one thing they have never produced is a bad film, and WALL-E is no exception. But in digesting the mixed references provoked by this tale of the little robot that could, I found myself again experiencing something for the first time with Pixar.

Disappointment.

He still does his tasks well: collecting the refuse, compacting it, and then aligning the crushed cubes into mountainous stacks that rival the city landscapes. Over the years, he has developed a habit of collecting the odd pieces of human history that fascinate him. One of those items is an old videotape of Hello, Dolly! which gives him a glimpse of a world he has never known. When not watching and recording snippets of the musical to keep him company as he works, he cares for his only company in this world: a friendly cockroach.

WALL-E's routine is disrupted when a spaceship lands briefly on earth to deposit a new distraction. The sleek, highly advanced visitor is a robot named EVE. WALL-E takes a shine to his new companion and follows her about as she scans the planet in pursuit of an unknown "directive". WALL-E inadvertently presents the object of her mission to her in the form of a plant he has found amidst the detritus and rescued. The plant sets gears in motion that will take both WALL-E and EVE off of the earth and on a trip that neither of them expected.

In the first 45 minutes to an hour of this film, it is not an exaggeration to say that WALL-E might rank not just amongst the best that children's films have to offer, but also the best of science fiction as well. Indeed, screenwriter/director Andrew Stanton could have skipped including a more overt homage to Kubrick's 2001 later in the film, because in an opening half that is almost utterly devoid of dialogue Stanton presents some of the best purely visual storytelling on film in a good couple of decades.

Like 2001, this movie advances story and develops characters richly with the mechanical noises of the robotic protagonists replacing the guttural growls of Kubrick's proto-humans at the dawn of man. This development is also greatly aided by a keen visual palate, the credit for which has to go to at least in part to uncredited Visual Consultant Roger Deakins. The long-time Coan Brothers' cinematographer helped Pixar to visualize the abandoned planet Earth on a scale unlike anything I think the animation studio has attempted before. As vivid as their depiction of Sydney, Australia was in Finding Nemo, this has to be an order of magnitude greater for how real the wasteland looks and feels, and the detail lent to the composition of every shot. This is the kind of thing that blu-ray DVD and HDTV were made for.

But the life (or rather the absence thereof) that the landscape sustains is colored so beautifully in the personality given to WALL-E and EVE. I have read some comparisons of WALL-E to the robot Johnny 5 from Short Circuit in physical appearance, but a close friend I think nailed it more closely in her assessment. WALL-E holds much more in common with E.T. in appearance and disposition, and I love the little bugger for it. If a robot can be cuddly with its hard metal exterior and sharp edges, it would look and act just like WALL-E. He gives a demonstration of physical comedy that Chaplin would have been envious of.

And he provides a nice counterpoint to EVE's slick polish and cool exterior. Reportedly, Apple Computer's design guru Jonathan Ive helped craft EVE's appearance and that attention to detail is well appreciated. EVE is the glamour girl to WALL-E's little tramp, and unlike the tendencies in adult comedies to the awkward unattractive male to wind up with the glamorous female lead, in this case the odd couple works deeply for me on a number of different levels. EVE is strong, determined and well accomplished. What more could a man robot ask for?

Where my disappointment with the film stems from is in the second half when the ancestors of the original human inhabitants of Earth come into play. EVE and WALL-E's journey takes them to the Axiom, the starship Earth's original inhabitants fled in. As EVE's mission is unveiled and the role the humans have to play is brought into full relief, the film seems to sputter a bit.

Part of this might be attributed to a conflict between Stanton's goals with the film and his screenplay. Stanton has said in publicity appearances promoting the film that he was more interested in telling a "love story" than he was in making a message film. But the part of the story that ties back to humanity cannot possibly be viewed in any other way than as a soft-sell social commentary. The message is light enough to get across to the younger viewers in the fairy tale moral sense that one expects from kiddie flicks, but it does not really give any kind of weight to the story overall.

Furthermore, it takes time away from the two characters that the audience is already invested in. EVE and WALL-E have a beautifully realized scene outside of the Axiom that is a nod to the romantic dance numbers of the Hello, Dolly! mold, but the rest of their time on the ship is spent in fairly routine chase sequences that do not carry the same emotional or comedic heft.

And because the human characters are underdeveloped, the cutaways to their part of the tale just do not to engage me on the same level that the robots' story does. Full credit to Jeff Garlin as the captain of the Axiom, he tries very hard with what he has to work with. I just did not find his story or that of the Axiom as interesting.

That lack of investment in the humans is something I found myself thinking about as well with Michael Bay's Transformers last July. Perhaps it says something more about me that I relate better to the robotic characters in summer films than I do my own flesh and blood fellow humans, but it seems like so much more effort is given to make the robots seem more human that the humans themselves wind up getting short shrift. By the end of the story when everything is tied up in an all-too-convenient bow, I am ready for the movie to be over, something I cannot ever remember feeling about any other Pixar film.

This is not meant to damn the movie with faint praise. It is a good, solid family film, one I am sure will make the kids happy for a distraction during the long hot summer that we are looking at this year. I think it is worth the price of admission for the Pixar short that precedes WALL-E alone, a cartoon that does its best salute to Bugs Bunny even as Stanton's main feature pays homage to sci-fi films in general.

But given how consistently I feel Pixar has nailed the mark previously, it is a little bit disorienting to come out of WALL-E feeling like it was not all it could have been. Maybe it is a bit of my own robotic tendencies to feel like this program does not compute.

Perhaps I need to have my movie-going brain debugged?

---

Tag this article:

Average user rating

   (0 vote)