Wall∙E
Pixar has made rats lovable, brought toys to life
and convinced us the world could be saved by a family of superheroes,
but can the geniuses of animation keep kids and adults interested in a
film without much dialogue, even if Wall∙E is the cutest robot since
R2-D2?
Set hundreds of years after Earth was abandoned by humans because of
the huge amount of garbage littered across the planet, Wall∙E is a
solitary garbage collecting robot who continues to build skyscrapers of
trash by day, and watches Hello, Dolly by night with his best buddy (a
cock roach, you knew those little buggers would be the only ones to
survive the apocalypse). One day, a strange alien robot, Eve, shows up
and our little Wall∙E thinks she is just swell (That’s the
innocent way of saying it. In reality, he thinks she is Angelina Jolie
of robots), and falls in love with the powerful, career driven lady
who’s on a mission, can kick a little booty, and
doesn’t have time for fooling around.
Can Wall∙E charm Eve into
loving him?
What is her mission?
Wall∙E is like the greatest
Charlie Chaplin silent movie ever made as
this lovable little pile of nuts and bolts wins over our hearts with
his cute reactions, his nervous bumbling and stumbling as he tries to
impress Eve, and his bright and cheerful demeanor. It is shocking to
see this amount of emotion coming from a robot (and an animated one at
that!), and you are left to realize Wall∙E has more charm than the
entire cast of The Hills combined.
However, after a fantastic beginning and the introduction of the Wall∙E
and Eve love story, director/writer Andrew Staunton and co-writer Jim
Capobianco seem to run out of ideas when it comes to advancing the
story. The love story starts to take a back seat as Wall∙E ends up on a
journey taking him across the universe, but it’s all a bit
too Al Gore and preachy for me. The world is abandoned due to our own
lack of care for the environment, then they throw in some bashing on
people becoming too fat and lazy, then we are reminded about the evils
of a huge corporate entity that is taking over the world (I hate the
corporations, too, but I go to cute, G-rated, kid movies to get away
from that stuff).
Also, Wall∙E has one massive, almost unforgivable
flaw. Fred Willard
appears in the movie as an all powerful corporate leader, but I
don’t mean his voice appears. While all of the characters in Wall∙E
are computer generated,
Willard’s scenes are filmed
and spliced into the movie without altering him in any way. All of the
other human characters in Wall∙E are cartoonish
looking, and
Willard’s non-cartoonish appearance ruins the consistency. It
removes the audience from the Wall∙E world and made
me wonder why
Willard is so different from everything else in the movie.
He’s not an alien. The other humans haven’t morphed
into aliens. It’s just odd.
You’ll want to bring little stuffed Wall∙E home with you, but
try not to fall asleep in the middle of the movie.
Wall∙E is rated G.
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