Wall-E is an interesting narrative challenge. The first half-hour or so of the film features very little dialogue: maybe not more than a few sentences' worth. So thus, the most important part of any story, the beginning, has to be told through visuals, action, and sound. Wall-E challenges the traditional movie-goer to sit down, shut up, and just watch as a tiny robot goes about it's directive. What's more, the principle characters (Wall-E and EVE) don't have voices themselves, instead communicating the entire film through beeps, blips, and a vague sputter of noises that resembles one another's name.
Of course, this would not be a Pixar film if this little robot, the titular Wall-E, did not have a spark of something more, and that something is apparent right from the get-go: Wall-E is lonely and seeks companionship, something that every person can at some point relate. What makes Wall-E so charming is that while he goes about his mission to clean up a disparate, polluted Earth, he obviously pushes onward in his own way to seek a friend in a place that is obviously so very quiet and lonely.
If the crowds of the new millennium can relate to and understand the world of Finding Nemo or the imaginative realities of Toy Story, then the futuristic world portrayed in Wall-E should require a 1000-page manual to explain the in's and out's right away. Again, the movie builds it's world and lays out the rules all in that oh-so-crucial first half-hour with nary a line of dialog. And it succeeds marvelously. While the movie leave some assumptions to the viewer (how did a robot develop a personality?), everything in the film makes some sense, so parents and children alike should be able to fall into Wall-E's world without hesitation.
And it's a marvelous world. Pixar perfected the use of computer generated imagery for animation with Toy Story, and has been refining perfection ever since. While the bubbly colors of Finding Nemo or Monster's, Inc. might appeal to a younger generation, the brown-n-gray world of Wall-E looks fantastic, blending the realities of an over-polluted Earth with the rounded design of a futuristic spaceship. I've never cared for the heavily-cartooned human characters that Pixar has used in its films, but they work well in Wall-E, but this is partially because they are rarely seen until the latter half of the film.
Wall-E has a few problems. It felt a bit preachy in it's subject manner: a consumerist world is overtaken by, of all things, a retail giant, and eventually humans are driven from Earth, forced to seek shelter in space. While this is certainly an eco-warning of sorts, at least the concept fits in with the narrative of the film really well. This, however, is the only minor complaint that I can level against the film.
Wall-E succeeds because it is a film that drives to the center of the human psyche and examines the one human emotion that humans may never fully understand: love. Against all odds, two robots meet, grow, and learn to love one another, even against all odds, better opportunities, and possibly death. Despite all the techno-babble, the beautiful sights, and the overly-cute nature of the film, by the time the credits roll, when our two love-struck robots are grasping one another, repeating their barely recognizable names to one another, it is very apparent that Pixar understands what love is. It's also not hard to sprout a tear of joy once or twice - an emotion that animation rarely brings to the theater.
Pixar's ninth masterpiece is not just the best movie of the year thus far, it's their best film ever, and Disney's best film since The Lion King.
Bravo.
B3 out.
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