Review: Wall•E

In the past I have driz­zled praise all over Pixar, specif­i­cally the fantasy-realist films that Brad Bird has made with them. There are many rea­sons to heap lau­rels on the Disney-owned ani­ma­tion stu­dio: its inno­va­tion in the field of com­puter ani­ma­tion before such a thing even existed, its cre­ative use of all avail­able tools at any given point in their his­tory, its abil­ity to cap­ti­vate the minds and pocket books of chil­dren and adults alike. “Wall•E”, how­ever, is some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing more than any of us thought these imag­i­neers were capa­ble of.

One of an army of sim­i­lar robots built to clean up the mess that humans have left behind after leav­ing earth, Wall•E has out­lasted every sin­gle one of his com­pa­tri­ots on the planet. He mean­ders through a city that has become a land­fill as the sole sur­vivor of seven hun­dred years of neglect, often pass­ing iden­ti­cal robots which have since shorted or died. His only friend is a cock­roach who fol­lows him around while he does the dirty work. This lonely exis­tence goes on for an extremely long chuck of this “chil­drens” film. It is har­row­ing, but Wall•E seems to have devel­oped a per­son­al­ity over time, enough to keep us enter­tained as he makes the best of his fright­en­ing sit­u­a­tion, col­lect­ing trin­kets and watch­ing video­tapes on an iPod.

His world is rocked, lit­er­ally, when a ship lands with a newer, shinier robot aboard, Eva. Okay, you may notice I have been refer­ring to Wall•E with mas­cu­line pro­nouns, and about about to slap some fem­i­nine ones onto Eva. I wouldn’t do this if the film­mak­ers didn’t force my hand on this one. My only com­plaint with the film is that, because it is Disney, we can’t have robots that exist out­side of gen­der, which is stu­pid because tech­ni­cally they are just write and metal and soft­ware. Heaven for­bid we even think that they are two boys or two girls rub­bing moth­er­boards. I’ll look the other way on this one since after all, they did make a por­ten­tous view of the future with long fits of silence and zero furry crea­ture while still find­ing a way to sell it to kids.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Eva comes to Earth and keeps blow­ing stuff up until she decides to befriend Wall•E. Silly dolt that he is, our hero falls head over heels for the tough girl on the play­ground, but I guess he could never get inti­mate with cock­roach, so Eva would have to do. As a gift, he gives her a plant, which shuts her down com­pletely until the day a ship comes for her. Wall•E stows away on board and is taken to the space­ship that houses the remain­ing humans in the uni­verse. We learn that “Buy ‘N’ Save”, a con­glom­er­ate that man­aged to get its CEO elected President of the world, was offer­ing up vaca­tions to space for a few years while Wall•E robots would clean up their homes. Once most of them were up there, global warm­ing took effect, wiped out human­ity, 700 years passed, and now the only remain­ing humans in the uni­verse are fat, sit in chairs, suck meals out of cups, and com­mu­ni­cate with each other only through video screens on float­ing chairs. Oddly enough, it sounds pretty plau­si­ble.

Eva, it turns out, is a recon­nais­sance bot that the moth­er­ship has been send­ing out ever since the humans left in search of sus­tain­able life on Earth via pho­to­syn­the­sis. The plant Wall•E gives her rep­re­sents the abil­ity to return home for the chubby cap­tain of the ship, but the com­put­ers want to fight back and won’t let peo­ple go home. Here is where the film will start to freak you out if you think about it too long. Computers are just com­put­ers right? They do what we tell them? Well, not any­more, not in this movie at least. Wall•E’s per­son­al­ity turns out to be con­ta­gious as he and Eva go against every­thing they have been pro­grammed to do in hopes of sav­ing the plant that rep­re­sents a new begin­ning for…humans. They are moti­vated by a need to help oth­ers, for some­thing they can­not even begin to under­stand. Or do they?

The philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions abound, but don’t worry, the film’s mes­sage may be heavy-handed but its exe­cu­tion is just as fun as any other offer­ing from the Mouse House’s 3D shin­gle. I am reminded of Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits”, a romp that I loved as a child about a boy who trav­els through time steal­ing trea­sure with a band of dwarves. After watch­ing it as an adult, I see that it preaches the impor­tance of imag­i­na­tion over tech­no­log­i­cal dis­trac­tions, as well as explo­rative of many lit­er­ary view­points of good and evil. In other words, I hope that the rugrats who are watch­ing “Wall•E” today will soon be able to see the real value in it, which goes far beyond a cute robot hit­ting him­self in the face with a paddle-ball. Of course, that moment is part of this masterpiece’s charm too.