Simply the Best
WALL•E, the ninth full-length, feature-animated film to come out of Pixar Animation Studios, is one of, if not the best, films of 2008. It’s a superb romantic comedy, a solid science fiction film, an action adventure fantasy, and, despite its directors frequent denials, a social and environmentally cautionary tale.
While children will no doubt be a huge part of its audience, WALL•E is not just a kid’s film. At advanced media screenings, it wasn’t at all unusual to hear rounds of applause as the credits rolled.
Everything about the film, from its endearing characters, solid storytelling, and breathtaking artwork, is a wonder to behold.
WALL•E is not perfect. There are a few plot holes and two or three leaps of logic are required to get past some of the laws of physics, but they float by as effortlessly as WALL•E mastering a space walk.
Catchin some rays, WALL•E recharges.
Image copyright© Disney. All rights reserved.
“WALL•E” stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter • Earth-Class. He is basically a small mobile trash compacter. So self-sufficient that after nearly 700 years of compressing billions of tons of post-consumer waste, he has achieved a level of consciousness. A consciousness that’s left him with a yearning for one of humanity’s most basic needs, and the one thing he can’t find on Earth, companionship.
WALL•E is the last of his kind. In fact, he’s the last working thing of any kind—apart from his pet cockroach—on the planet. Mankind bugged out centuries ago when the world became overrun with the debris of its consumerist culture.
Buy N Large, the massive global entity that gained control of the planet, promised to use its extensive line of WALL•Es to clean up the mess it was largely responsible for. The company sent everyone on Earth into space on the AXIOM, a gigantic luxury space cruiser. The cleanup and cruise were expected to last five years.
And then, as it’s wont to do in fantasy films, something went terribly wrong. Generations of humans end up spending the next 700 years in space aboard the AXIOM devolving into large, bloated, baby-like beings. They know nothing more about life other than floating about the AXIOM on hover chairs and having their every whim and slightest need met by the ship’s robot crew.
Every so often, the highly automated AXIOM dispatches a spacecraft with a company of EVE ((Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) bots back to Earth to look for signs of life. It’s on one of these visits that WALL•E sees and falls for an EVE bot.
It’s a rough courtship and anyone who has ever been the first to fall in love will be able to identify with WALL•E’s comic attempts to capture and hold EVE’s attention, which he does as their adventure together begins.
Buy N Large luxury space cruiser the AXIOM awaits its final destiny.
Image copyright© Disney. All rights reserved.
Story, Story, Story, and…Oh Yeah, Story!
As a studio, Pixar is often credited with taking risks. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Talk to anyone who has ever worked on a Pixar project, from its series of hilarious shorts to its successful feature length films, and you’ll hear one word repeated so often that chances are you’ll get sick of it: STORY!
It is story, rather than risk, that drives everything Pixar does. WALL•E is no exception. Collectively, everyone connected with WALL•E approached their specific tasks with one thought in mind: “how does what I’m about to do serve the story?”
Director Andrew Stanton’s vision of the character of WALL•E may have been inspired by a pair of binoculars, but the plucky little bot’s inquisitive nature, world class comedic timing, and endearing personality are all the result of the combined talents of Pixar’s animation team starting work each day asking that same question about story.
The sets and background artwork by Ralph Eggleston (production designer), Anthony Christov (sets art director), Bert Berry (shader art director), and Jason Deamer (character art director) so beautifully evoke a sense of place that we never doubt, even for a moment, that WALL•E’s story is real.
What Message?
Andrew Stanton has steadfastly maintained that WALL•E is “basically a love story between two robots.” If the story holds any deeper meaning at all for Stanton it is “that the most human characters in the movie are robots.”
He rejects the notion that his movie is intended to be a warning to children and parents to get up off of their comfy chairs, stop polluting the planet, and overindulging in junk food and passive forms of entertainment.
Stanton and his team may not have intended WALL•E to contain a warning for mankind, but it’s hard not to see one as WALL•E busies himself running about collecting what to him are treasures and, to us, are the debris of day-to-day life. Additionally, the overly pampered humans on the AXIOM evoke nervous laughter as audiences identify with many of their slothful habits, even as they’re somewhat revolted by the uniformity of their corpulence.
Stanton also rejects the idea that the robot crew of the AXIOM may, across the centuries, have over interpreted their programming and deliberately, or unintentionally, transformed humans into pudgy piglets. Even so, there is a scene in the film that suggests one of the automated crew may have engineered a plan to keep the AXIOM’s human cargo compliant.
Stanton says he got the idea for blobby humans from NASA. “Disuse atrophy sets in if you don’t simulate gravity just right the entire time,” Stanton said. The problem is that the AXIOM has plenty of gravity. In flashback, we see humans swimming in its giant pool, which is still full of water 700 years after liftoff, and exercising on its broad decks.
WALL•E on his way to work.
Image copyright© Disney. All rights reserved.
The Inside Story
It wouldn’t be a Pixar film without Easter Eggs, lots and lots of Easter Eggs—those delicious cameo tidbits by characters, objects, even sounds from the studios’ past. The interior of WALL•E’s container home is packed with dozens of what he considers fascinating finds from his long days on the trash piles, including a great many of the toys from Pixar’s Toy Story, among other things.
Apple’s Macintosh computer plays a part in the film furnishing some of WALL•E’s sound effects and, via MacInTalk, the voice of Auto, the AXIOM’s autopilot.
Veteran film editor and sound designer Ben Burtt created the voices of WALL•E and scrubber bot MO, along with Auto. Comedian Jeff Garlin is the voice of the AXIOM’s human Captain. In a nice twist on cinematic history, actor Sigourney Weaver, whose film debut pitted her character of Warrant Officer Ripley against a malevolent space ship computer called MOTHER, is the voice of Ship’s Computer in WALL•E.
John Ratzenberger, who has been in every Pixar film since the original Toy Story, and actor Kathy Najimy are the voices of John and Mary. Veteran character actor Fred Willard, appearing on film, as Shelby Forthright, Buy N Large world wide CEO, rounds out the cast of WALL•E.
Wonder (n):a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable [just like this film!]
—New Oxford American Dictionary
Walt Disney Pictures Presents
A Pixar Animation Studios Film
WALL•E: A+
A must see for audiences of all ages.
Director: Andrew Stanton
Producer: Jim Morris
Executive Producer: John Lasseter
Screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon
Feature run time: 143 Minutes
Rated: “G”
