Meet Wall-E
Wall-E is the most recent offering from Pixar studios, its title character an adorably clunky robot, about the size of a large microwave with tank treads and coke-bottle glasses. Wall-E spends his days scooping garbage into his cubical chest, where it is compressed into blocks, which he stacks into towering mounds of compressed junk. He does this because it’s his job. Mother Earth has been so deeply buried in humanity’s garbage that humanity decided to head into space, waiting for the day when an army of robots manages to dispose of enough waste to make the earth habitable once again. The clean-up effort is a slow business. Judging by the mounds of trash, it may never be completed—indeed, judging by the non-functioning robots from which Wall-E salvages replacement parts, it may already have failed.
The clean-up effort is a lonely business, too. Wall-E may not be the last trashbot on earth, but he might as well be. While Wall-E dutifully crushes and stacks all day, day after day, he has developed (if not been programmed for) a need for companionship. He keeps a pet cockroach, and spends a few minutes every evening mooning over a pair of hands held in an old copy of Guys and Dolls before dutifully powering down for the night.
Wall-E’s world changes dramatically when a sleek, white robot appears. Eve, for that is the new robot’s name, is on a mission to find signs of life, and Wall-E is instantly smitten with her, the obsolete nerdbot too lovestruck to realize he hasn’t a chance with this cutting-edge beauty queen, not even after she proves prone to blasting anything that moves too suddenly. As fate would have it, Eve finds signs of life, a tiny curl of green vine poking through the wasteland. She snatches it up, radios a signal to the mothership, and goes into hibernation, waiting for an automated retrieval. Wall-E tends the inert Eve, and even leaves his post to pursue her into space, where we finally see what humanity has been up to in all these years.
Eating, or rather drinking nutritive milkshakes, mostly. And floating about in fully decked-out levitating recliners, yakking about nothing over their video screens while ignoring even the station they inhabit, leaving all the work to robots. And drinking nutritive milkshakes. Humanity has become very, very fat. Eva’s arrival, and with her evidence of green life on earth, precipitate a crisis between those who want to pursue the original mission of returning to earth and those who wish to remain in the womb-like station indefinitely, and mayhem ensues.
Wall-E is an excellent piece of work, fully restoring my confidence in Pixar after the rather tepid Ratatouille and the smarmy-preachy Cars. I heartily endorse it…if you’re a kid, or looking for something to take your children to see. Understand that Wall-E is very definitely a children’s movie.
You can see it in the pacing. While the long, establishing scenes of Wall-E, a tiny speck in an endless wasteland of…well, waste, are not without value, they felt rather long to me, a veteran sci fi fan already redundantly familiar with the notion of humanity burying its planet in a choking layer of its own trash. Children, who may be less familiar with the theme, need a good, long exposure to the set-up. The extended scene wherein Eve quickly falls for Wall-E (Of course she does. Duh!), and the way she whines “Wally” every three or four seconds in the dramatic conclusion, started to grate on me, because I’m a grown-up, and the scenes were trite. Kids might not see anything obvious about it all. The big reveal of the villain is telegraphed way, way ahead of time, thanks to an infamous icon which easily could have been downplayed until getting sudden attention along with the reveal, letting adults share in the moment.
The movie could have been much more powerful as a PG-13 show. If some bloated humans died, or at least been injured, as a result of their atrophied bones and musculature (or atrophied technical know-how!) when the effluent hit the exhaust pump, the dangers of pampered, vacuous life on a space station would be more meaningful. If Wall-E’s personality, his effective “self,” vanished (as it should) when his motherboard was replaced, the reality of his sacrifice would intensify the nobility of his actions. If Eva’s precious “imperative” were indeed imperative, it would heighten the pathos of the robots’ condition, and it wouldn’t cheapen her early use of the word as an excuse to blow Wall-E off. But if Wall-E had done these things, it would be a different movie, for a different audience, and it’s not quite fair to blame the film for taking the path it did.
As it was, the film lacked the kind of adult lens that Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles employed, along with a lot of sly humor aimed at adult tastes, and I found myself dismissing the cutesy robot leads in favor of an interest in the space station’s captain, who grasps the larger issues in a way that Wall-E and Eva do not, and who shakes himself out of a lifetime torpor to choose sides and fight. Wall-E simplifies the sophisticated issues of environment and the heroic ideal of teleos into a sort of rugby scrum over a potted plant in a way I found pointless and therefore dull.
Instead of being fully engaged in the plot and characters, therefore, I had to settle for appreciating the movie as craft, and there is considerable craft to appreciate. The work that went into Wall-E’s movement and anatomy is top-notch, just human enough to surprise when he does something the human body can’t do, yet, after you blink and think it over, his motions are perfectly sensible for something designed to bend in ways we don’t. The contrasting depiction of junkyard earth and gleaming space station is well executed. The inclusion of footage of actual humans (including Fred Willard as the too-slick CEO largely responsible for the mess) on display was a ballsy move, given the contrast to the very cartoonish blubber-butts seen throughout the station, but it works; even side-by-side, neither human form seems somehow wrong. The script wrings a lot of character out of a couple of robots who share a four-word vocabulary. And, while the movie carries a moral—two morals, in fact—it never crosses the line into preachiness.
I love Pixar to pieces; I have since catching the animated “Luxo” short as a freshman in college, well before Toy Story made the studio a household name. I am happy to see Wall-E meet the high standards we’ve come to expect from Pixar. Wall-E is a swell movie, even if it’s not my movie. And that’s okay. We teach our children to take turns. Today is their turn to play with Pixar. Maybe tomorrow will be mine again.