WALL-E

Animated family science fiction

• Written by Andrew Stanton and Jim Capobianco
• Directed by Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton and Pixar made a courageous movie. When Disney finances your big-budget family entertainment, it takes guts to look closely and critically at such consequences of our consumer culture as garbage, obesity, and planetary destruction. Making an almost dialog-free film also took a fair amount of backbone. WALL-E wimps out in the third act–which is both disappointing and probably inevitable–and while that diminishes Stanton’s achievement, it doesn’t destroy it.

As you probably know, WALL-E is a small trash compactor robot who appears to be the last functioning machine built by the apparently extinct human race. He’s spent the last seven centuries doing what he was built to do–compact trash into neatly-stacked cubes. But he’s fascinated with much of what he finds, and keeps a collection of items that touched his mechanical little heart. At night, he returns to his home and watches an old video tape of Hello, Dolly.

WALL-E’s routine changes when a more advanced robot arrives from space. While WALL-E is old, rusty and clumsy, EVE is slick and fast. She also has a tendency to blow up anything she sees as a threat. WALL-E slowly gains her trust, building a friendship that turns into a romance. (Yes, I know that robots have no gender, and this G-rated movie never explores what they might actually do with each other, but watching the picture you entirely accept that WALL-E is male, EVE female, and romantic love possible.)

Eventually WALL-E follows EVE into space, where the morbidly-obese survivors of the human race live a life of meaningless luxury on a huge ship run by robots. After satirizing a society where technology has removed all need for exertion and where actual physical contact between humans appears to be eliminated (once again, the G-rated WALL-E avoids answering some obvious questions), the movie sets up a hero/villain dynamic so it can finish like a conventional animated action comedy.

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows how far the art of computer animation has come in recent years, especially at Pixar. As a character, WALL-E stands out as another great leap forward. Technically, his dull metal body probably didn’t provide that challenges of Monsters, Inc.‘s the fur-covered cast. But the level of character and emotion that Stanton and his animators got out of this odd-looking gadget with relatively few moveable parts is simply amazing. That they did it without dialog is nothing short of astonishing.

I believe WALL-E is the first Pixar movie to contain live-action footage–and not just the Hello, Dolly scenes. Video clips from the distant past include Fred Willard as Shellby Forthright, CEO of Buy n Large–a sort of Wallmart that took over the world. The corporation, apparently, played a very large room in humanity’s self-destruction.

You can’t make a big-budget family movie without a happy ending. I knew that going in. But I wish that Stanton had ended it in a way that wasn’t quite so happy.