Wall-E
By Robbie Collin
KIDS’ films, eh? Always packing in a moral.
“Be nice to others.” “Always follow your dream.”
Or, in the case of WALL-E: “Our planet will end up a barren wasteland and it’s all your fault, you grasping, selfish, bone-idle little berks.”
Yes. Despite the cutesy posters and U certificate, this latest offering from Pixar ain’t quite sugar and spice.
It’s 700 years in the future. Earth is a deserted, dead husk. Humanity shipped out 500 years ago after burying the planet in waste.The only living thing to be seen is a single cockroach. And the only other moving object? A Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth-class robot. Or WALL-E.
Who, over half a millennium of mindless drone work, has developed something nobody could have expected. A charming personality.
This has big, philosophical implications, of course. Namely: Holly Willoughby is going to be one hell of a presenter in 2508.
WALL-E spends his days gathering discarded junk, squeezing it into his compactor belly and stacking the resultant cubes in massive, skyscraper-sized piles.
Sometimes he finds something worth holding on to—be it practical, like replacement eye cameras, or just odd, like a spork (that’s a fork/spoon/knife combo, by the way)—and takes it back to his garage.
But mostly it’s an endless cycle of gather, cube, stack.
And the most depressing thing of all? Only one form of entertainment has survived, playing over and over on a monitor in WALL-E’s garage: Hello Bleedin’ Dolly.
Now let’s just savour the horror of that for a moment. In an entire year of watching film after film about torture, death and misery, I’ve not seen anything even five per cent as bleak as the thought of Michael Crawford chirping out Put On Your Sunday Clothes across Earth’s dead wastelands for all eternity. WALL-E watches the film every night.
He even starts mimicking the dance moves, in a moment that’s possibly the most heartbreaking screen portrayal of loneliness I’ve ever seen.
So when a second robot arrives on Earth—the sleek, iMac-like Eve— WALL-E dreams he’s found true love, like in his favourite movie.
The pair have a clumsy courtship, while Eve’s true mission remains secret—and this takes up the first half of the film.
Other than WALL-E and Eve bleeping each other’s names, the howl of the wind and the rousing soundtrack, this is all done in almost complete silence.
The humour comes from slapstick, which has more in common with classic silent films than Pixar’s other hits such as Cars and Ratatouille—and it’s done to a stupidly high standard.
It’s pointless saying anything about the visuals, other than that they set an amazing new benchmark that’s better than anything else you’ve ever seen in terms of technical brilliance and beauty.
And the perfectly executed silent gags paired with the mournful atmosphere make this an unforgettable and unique film. (I’m still on the verge of tears whenever I think of that poor sod watching Hello Dolly night after night.)
Problem is, WALL-E is stitched up by the hugeness of its own ambition. Because great as all this is, the story has to go somewhere. And when Eve’s mission finally kicks in and the two robots travel to a human-populated spacecraft, it lapses into a run-of-the-mill family movie.
WALL-E is by no means a perfect film. But it is an important one in that it’s the first mainstream computer-animated one to go beyond being “just” entertaining.
With a film like Kung Fu Panda, which sets out the stall with its title, you know what to expect. You anticipate fun. It delivers. WALL-E is not like that. The kids may not enjoy it quite as much as they expect. And they might even be—shock—a bit bored at times. But there’s no question that it’s a brave new step for Pixar.
Which aims very, very, very high. And falls very, very, very slightly short.
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