It goes without saying that Pixar are the greatest animation studio in the world - fact, not opinion. And even though as narratives I find a few of them overrated, as far as pure animation quality goes they simply cannot be faulted. WALL·E is their latest and arguably greatest cinematic outing, a film of such visual wonder and flawless animation that one wonders whether or not the world shall see the very rare event of an animated film making an appearance in the Best Picture category come Oscars 2009.
Hundreds of years in the future mankind has abandoned earth due to the amount of rubbish that has accumulated, which has made it uninhabitable for humans, and robots are left to clean up the mess. As time as has gone on the only robot who has bothered to continue their work properly is WALL·E, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter · Earth Class. While obediently carrying out his instructions, one day another robot known as Eve is sent to earth to look for any life and WALL·E soon follows her back to the space colony where the remainder of mankind has been living ever since they left earth.
A risk that Pixar has taken with their latest offering is having no dialogue for at least the first 20 minutes of it. We follow WALL·E as he goes about his work, searching through the rubbish and keeping things he finds worth in. The only noise comes from the things that our little mechanical protagonist causes such as a fire extinguisher spraying or the rubbish crushing together, accompanied by his beeps and boops that substitute, for the most part, as some sort of voice. It’s in this section of the film that a lot of its charm is conjured from; there’s just something so endearing and cute about watching this little childish looking robot watching his favourite movie (Hello Dolly!, a strange and obscure choice by Pixar if you ask me) or even something as simple as trying to decide into which section of the drawer his sporks should go. I admire Pixar for being as brave as to make the film dialogue-free during its introduction and it certainly pays off.
However a plot is needed to carry the film further than this so in lands Eve, a slicker and certainly more advanced robot that WALL·E instantly is enamoured with. Forget the robot stuff for a second, this is somewhat a basic “guy trying to impress girl” story that provides some hilarious scenes, so we not only have these wonderful visuals and the charm factor but it’s also very, very funny. Multiple factors that work are key in a film like this.
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Article comments
1 - Al Barger
To a substantial extent, this WALL-E movie sucks ass. It's ugly to look at. The Earth is an ugly trash dump, nothing more. You could probably study it frame by frame and find lots of careful details - of ugly trashiness. It is SO not a great classic of animation that people will want to watch again and again. YUCK.
Brother Miller seems to have watched a different movie than me to be able to say that WALL-E does not hit you over the head with the environmental message. I'm not sure how they could possibly have hit viewers any harder than they did with this apocalyptic nonsense.
Nonetheless, it might well get an Oscar for Best Picture - but that would absolutely be as a cheap political statement, because the Hollywood wingnuts approve of the environmental hysteria. It will certainly NOT be because of beautiful animation. Expensive and detailed, but not particularly imaginative - and certainly not beautiful or delightful to the eyes. Nor, of course, will it be for the dialogue.
The robots were predictably cute and lovable, but pretty much everything else about this movie is unappetizing and worse.
2 - Peter
You said that "as narratives I find a few of them overrated". Can you specify which ones are overrated and why? I too think that some Pixar films are somewhat weak as narratives.
3 - Ross Miller
@Al Barger,
wow. First off it's good to see someone as enthusiastic and passionate about films as you seem to be, whether it's positive OR negative. Like anything in film it's all subjective - you may have found that Wall E beat you over the head with the message and were unable to see past that but I wasn't. I SAW that they were portraying the message but didn't feel like it took spotlight over anything else (quite the opposite actually).
@Peter,
well the Pixr film I find most overrated (and I haven't seen them all, well not Finding Nemo and Cars) is The Incredibles. To me that went against what I love about them as filmmakers - usually they make films about inanimate objects or fantasized creatures interacting ie. toys, fish, cars, monsters etc but with The Incredibles it was about humans and it just didn't sit with me right. I also find Monsters Inc and Rataouille to be overrated, the former because it seems to rest on the cute factor a litle too much (especially with the little girl character) and the latter because although I really, really liked it I just don't see why it's SO amazing.
WALL - E is the first Pixar film (like I said) since Toy Story where I was in complete AWE.