Three things in one: a robot love story, a cautionary fable, and another Pixar demonstration in how to create a richly detailed and textured world.
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Well, they've done it again. Through amazing animation and skillful storytelling, the Disney-Pixar gang has found a way to make us care about a trash-compacting robot whose attitude toward work and life might even provide a little inspiration for humans. Same with the movie itself, which obviously hopes to inspire the next generation to be better stewards of the earth and consume less.
In his theatrical review for DVD Town, Jason Vargo gave "Wall-E" a 7 out of 10 because of its "left wing 'green' theme." But I didn't find the film's truth to be nearly as inconvenient as Jason did. Unlike "Bambi," where the obvious theme of man's hunting and carelessness is a point-of-view thing, the green elements form the structural core of this film. It would be hard to make it any other way. So while I would agree with Jason that "Wall-E" is a blatant advocacy film, I would also point out in that respect it's not unlike "The Ten Commandments" and its heavily Christian theme. The question for me is how artful the presentation, and in the case of both the Cecil B. DeMille classic and this soon-to-be classic, there's plenty to praise. In fact, if artistry were seismographic, "Wall-E" would register off the charts.
All you have to do is compare "Wall-E" to the 2005 Fox animated feature "Robots," which was certainly a competent bit of animation. But you never believed that those characters were anything more than cartoon robots. With Wall-E, you become instantly fascinated by the amount of personality that animators were able to infuse into such a tiny little garbage-compacting package. The eyes are the window to the soul, and Wall-E's eyes are as expressive as anyone's. This little guy, who, besides a cockroach friend, is the only sign of movement and intelligent thought left on the trash pile that used to be Planet Earth, has a work routine, and by golly, he's going to do his job, even there's no supervisor around and even if workload is impossible. Talk about a work ethic! The amount of trash skies higher than the skyscrapers and there's no sign of life, yet buoyed by an old VHS tape he found of "Hello, Dolly!" this diminutive robot imagines a world "Out There" and figuratively decides to "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" to make the best of things. Like the Dwarfs in Disney's first full-length animated feature, this little guy basically whistles while he works, though conditions are less than ideal.
Earth's bleak landscape features sudden storms that Wall-E must deal with, but he's got his own refuge: the inside of a big piece of machinery in which he stores all of the trash treasures he's rescued, collecting them in a secret stash the way that Ariel did in "The Little Mermaid." Old Christmas lights decorate the inside, and this solar-powered robot has also managed to collect spare parts for himself. He may be a Waste Load Lifter--Earth Class, but he's no dummy. Even cartoon characters get smashed up a bit, and this guy can be his own doctor.
Things change, though, when a rocket ship lands, dropping off a high-tech flying robot probe that's been sent to Earth to check for signs of plant life. It's the first creature besides the cockroach that Wall-E has seen, and so it's predictably love at first sight. EVE, meanwhile, has been programmed to be just a little bit cautious . . . and trigger-happy. Any sudden movements, and this kid blasts away. Here too, you have to credit the filmmakers for giving us a robot love story that unfolds in romantic comedy tradition and ups the ante in the caring department.
It turns out that Earth has been a trash heap for the past 700 years, and the residents who had been urged to consume, consume, consume by a Big Brother conglomerate that in the future has become one gigantic corporation have been living in a spaceship waiting for the clean-up to be finished. Well, with one tiny robot slaving away, that's going to take some time. Obviously, corporate greed takes a hit here, as does the bigger-is-better mentality that's driven American consumerism for the past 50 years. People in the future do nothing but sit in movable beach chairs and suck down whatever food and drink is handed to them, watch whatever propaganda is displayed on individual screens before them, and atrophy in a blissful state of ignorance. Video gamers take a hit too, as creators project that America's entire sedentary culture will result in a fat, bovine life far removed from the world of nature that ought to have been sustaining us.
Yes, it's heavy-handed--or just plain heavy, as when one fat person falls out of his seat and needs robots to help him up again, or when the ship tilts and all the fat folks fall helplessly like a pile of Weebles. But I happen to think its pure genius for the Pixar folks to combine an ecological crisis with what the Endocrine Society is calling an Obesity Crisis. Sixty-seven percent of American males and 62 percent of American females are considered overweight. The society estimates that 400,000 people die each year as a result of poor diet and low physical activity. What's surprising to me is that Disney, an outfit that's usually so overly cautious about offending anyone to the point where we'll probably never, ever see a film like "Song of the South," would show overweight people in such a bad light. But there they are, and the Pixar people are obviously hoping this film will make a difference. From a storytelling perspective, though, the people are victims of the most heinous sort of corporate takeover, and from there it's only a short leap from to a "2001: A Space Odyssey" confrontation.
For "Wall-E" the Disney artists created two separate worlds, one a denuded, bleak, and post-apocalyptic landscape, and the other a glitzy and colorful "Jetsons"-style world of the future in which everything is programmed and automated, and robots that have been created to serve the humans can start to seem (at least to an outsider) more like jailers. What's amazing to me is the level of detail in Wall-E's world, with each individual piece of garbage rendered in striking detail that looks all the more striking in High Definition. That director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") and his animators are able to make such a bleak world still feel warm enough to support the most meager level of life is a real tribute to their skills, and that Stanton and fellow screenwriter Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.," "Toy Story") were able to hold an audience's interest with essentially a single non-human character doing his thing for the first third of the film. Though Ben Burtt handles the voice of the robot, he speaks very few recognizable words. The rest of his vocabulary are distinct, evocative sounds, and so we watch Wall-E with the same fascination that held us in thrall as we watched Tom Hanks shoulder the narrative burden in "Cast Away." You really have to see it to believe that such warmth and narrative interest could be generated by not just non-human robots, but drawn ones at that. Who would have thought that a robot love story combined with a cautionary fable about over-consumption would be such a hit?
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