You’ve got to hand it to the guys at Pixar, they don’t know how to make a bad movie. Some of their more enthusiastic fans seem to believe that each of the films always betters their previous efforts, maybe on a technical level but not always on a character or story level. TOY STORY is still a classic, as is its sequel; MONSTERS INC. too was classic material, and THE INCREDIBLES remains one of the best superhero family movies ever made. The films that came between these were still far ahead of anything any of the other US animation studios were producing even if they didn’t match the aforementioned movies. Already Pixar’s latest is getting the sort of superlative reviews and praise usually reserved for live action films by the world’s directorial elite.
WALL•E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth class) is a robot, the last robot on earth, in fact the last anything on earth – apart from the indestructible cockroach. After consumerism and its by-product, rubbish, made the planet uninhabitable, WALL•E and his cohorts were created by the Buy N Large Corporation to tidy up their mess while the Earth’s inhabitants were taken on a temporary space cruise during the clean up. The trouble was it took longer than anticipated, hundreds of years longer, which left our hero the last survivor, repairing himself with scraps from other robots and collecting all variety of knick-knacks and watching musicals on his iPod. That was until the day EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) a sleek, shiny white robot arrives and turns WALL•E’s world upside down, especially when she discovers his latest acquisition, a plant, and disappears with it, with WALL•E in hot pusuit.
The first 20-30 minutes of the film are its best as we follow WALL•E through his daily routines and the arrival of EVE. There is no dialogue, just the sounds of him and his environment – and his favourite tunes from HELLO DOLLY. What makes it so great is the attention to details that are too numerous to mention and ones that warrant several viewings just absorb them all, especially the stuff that WALL•E has collected. The detail in the animation and texturing really needs to be seen on a big screen to fully appreciate. There are also little things, such as WALL•E’s boot up sound is the same as that of a Mac. In fact there are several nods to Pixar’s major shareholder and ex-CEO, Steve Jobs’ other company, from the aforementioned iPod, EVE’s white body that resembles Mac’s computer range to the fact that some of voices are done by the Macintalk software. And of course there are the usual references to previous Pixar films. All good stuff for the eagle-eyed geeks to amuse themselves with.
Where the movie does slow down is when the two protagonists arrive at the spaceship, after the amazing aerial ballet, and have to interact with the humans. Here a lot of the initial magic vanishes (speaking of magic don’t miss the short that shows before the feature) and gives way to some rather simple but obvious morality tales about obesity, materialism and ecological conservation. Director Andrew Stanton asserts that when he first developed the initial concepts for the movie around the same time as TOY STORY, over a decade ago, these were not the hot topics they are today. Nevertheless, intentionally or not, the latter half of the film does come over a bit preachy. However, for the geeks there is still plenty of stuff to keep them excited form Sigourney Weaver’s voicing of the main spaceship to a very HAL-like computer and other nods to 2001.
Although it is receiving universal plaudits and looks set to be Pixar’s most successful movie to date (as well as reviving the Rubik’s Cube), for me it doesn’t quite match up to TOY STORY, MONSTERS INC or THE INCREDIBLES, which is no slight on the film because it is still fantastic entertainment and a great way to introduce children to one of sci-fi’s most popular sub-genres, the post-apocalyptic vision. But having said all that I will happily watch it again and again when it comes out on DVD and I can skip past the ethical messages.
WALL•E is out in cinemas on July 18.
Visit the official website / listen to our podcast of the press conference with Sigourney Weaver and sound designer Ben Burtt…
All images ©2008 Disney/Pixar