Wall-E

Wall-E (****)

Despite how much many of them seem to be universally loved, for the most part I've avoided the big animated movies that have come out of Pixar and Dreamworks in recent years. I don't really know why. I certainly can't say that I consider them beneath me, being "kid's stuff", because I spent a significant portion of my Memorial Day watching the Teen Titans marathon on Boomerang. But all the praise for Wall-E, from every age group, was too difficult to ignore, and I finally got around to watching it a couple of weeks ago. It really is one of the best American animated movies I've ever seen, and certainly one of the smartest, and not in a "how many pop culture references can we find a way for the furry animal characters to say" sort of way. It doesn't try and present itself on two different levels, one for kids and one for adults--like if a cartoon walrus puts on a pair of dark sunglasses and a baseball cap and starts rapping so all the adults can say "Oh I get it, he's like the black guy of the animal world! I can suddenly identify with these made up cartoon animals!". It just is what it is, and its something that anyone can appreciate.

A big thing that separates Wall-E from what's become the prototypical CGI animated movie is that it doesn't feel like it has to move at a mile-a-minute pace. For quite a while, the title character is the only character on screen. Wall-E--who looks a little bit like the R.O.B. robot that Nintendo created back in the '80s and brought back in viritual form for the last Smash Bros. game--has been tasked with cleaning up the massive piles of garbage which have littered the entire earth. While the work is done, all of humanity (I think? Maybe it was just all of America) is living aboard a giant mothership adrift in space on what is supposed to be a five year "cruise." The project is much more work than they estimated, however, and over time most of Wall-E's robotic companions have broken down, leaving him alone to endlessly build towers out of little cubes of garbage. Wall-E has enough of a human personality to get bored and lonely, and so he spends his downtime collecting random trinkets that he deems worthy to not be lumped in with the rest of the trash in an old cooler and watches VHS tapes of old musicals. Except for the lyrics of said musicals, and a still-working video billboard in which the President at the time of everyone's exodus from Earth, played by a real-life, in the flesh Fred Willard, explains how super great and awesome everything is going to be during their short jaunt into outer space, there's no spoken dialogue whatsover for probably the first third of the movie. Its quite an unusual move for a such a big, Hollywood, family movie, but the filmmaker's realized that it was simply unnecessary. The story is told simply and clearly through the movie's visuals, and we become indered to Wall-E through all of his various little mannerisms. Words would have just cluttered up the brilliant simplicity of the whole thing.

The main plot gets into motion when Wall-E's solitude is broken up one day when a much sleeker looknig robot with a female voice rockets down to earth. Her name is Eva, and she's searching for plant-life for reasons initially unbeknownst to us and to Wall-E. Initially she is focused only on her directive, and actually tries on a couple of occasions to blow up Wall-E with the obnoxiously powerful laser gun she's equipped with for some reason. Wall-E, however, wins her over eventually by sheltering her in his big tank-like home during a sandstorm, and dancing around to the tune of old musicals using a trashcan lid as a top hat. Eventually, Eva's mission takes them to the mothership of the starfleet drifting out in space, where the social commentary becomes even less subtle. Apparently hundreds of years with nothing to do except shop for whatever the myriad video screens abord the ship tell them to has caused humankind to degenerate into pudgy fatsos who ride on hoverchairs everywhere and whose muscles are too atrophied for them to walk anywhere. We meet the captain of the fatsos, voiced by Jeff Garlin, who doesn't seem to actually know much about being a captain, because most everything on the ship is completely autonomous. He hasn't completely lost the human spirit though, and evenutally finds himself in a 2001-esque rebellion against the ship's computers.

Even after we get to this point of the plot though, the movie isn't all this overt. Its not as silent as the opening of the film, but we get a lot of funny, yet weirdly poigniant moments, like a scene in which Wall-E has to catch up to Eva floating through space, so he shoots a fire extinguisher to propel him in the opposite direction, and we watch him glide around as little specks of foam drift away. There are a lot of moments like that, and its because of moments like that that the movie sets itself apart from most other animated movies. Its heartfelt, without seeming like a Hallmark card. The characters can express themselves without bursting into spontaneous singing and dancing with Randy Newman lyrics. A tremendously fun movie.