"WALL-E"

By: Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Whether it is toys, bugs or monsters; fish, cars or rats, Pixar Studios has turned the unconscious conscious by cleverly animating the inanimate. In WALL-E, Pixar took the next step in humanization, turning a post-apocalyptic dystopia into a charming adventure with a moral punch. WALL-E gives audiences everything they have reason to expect from Pixar, and even a bit more.

WALL-E is a garbage man, trash compactor and architect rolled into one rusted-over, sentimental machine. He wakes up in the morning (reboots), grabs a nice, hot dose of solar energy, and then sets off to work with his plastic lunch pale and cockroach friend. His job, his directive, is to clean up the trash heap that is Earth. He chugs across cities of garbage, picks a few morsels up, tosses them into his stomach compartment and mashes the trash into a neat little cube, which he then stacks into enormous, refuse skyscrapers. WALL-E also has a personal life, which is time spent cataloging insignificant treasures from the rubbish heaps while longing for humanesque contact.

The lonely world of WALL-E is rocked when a giant rocket lands into his life, right on top of his life. Out comes Eve, a shiny, spectacular and grossly intimidating babe of a robot. While Eve is buzzing around in search of her directive, WALL-E is a puppy dog, following her all over, hoping to get noticed by this dreamy cyborg while managing to look like a banged-up old klutz. Eventually Eve takes notice, finds WALL-E’s plain and unassuming nature charming, and a relationship develops.

Yet just when things are going perfectly for WALL-E, Eve unconsciously clams up and the rocket returns, snatching her back into space. But WALL-E is not about to let the best thing that ever happened to him just fly off. He clings to the side of the rocket ship and flies across the universe, ending up at an even larger space vessel. WALL-E, a cantankerous old simpleton of a robot, is introduced to a comfort-driven, automated society as if sprung from the pages of a Huxley novel. Grossly overweight humans ride around on flying chairs with video screens plastered in front of them. Everything is streamlined and automatic, making life outside the video screen unnecessary and uncomfortable. WALL-E has far more personality—seems like much less of an automaton—than these vapid Homo sapiens.

WALL-E never loses sight of his primary mission—reunification with Eve—but along the way plays an integral role in another mission. By being his same, old, outdated self, WALL-E opens the eyes of the bloated passengers and helps them take their first steps toward liberation from self-indulgent complacence. All he wanted was a companion, but WALL-E shows the depth of his character once he realizes that the universe’s problems are larger than his own.

The employees of Pixar Studios are masters of the human simile: they have a knack for making any ordinary object seem like a real person replete with idiosyncratic quirks and foibles. It is intrinsically amusing to see a rusty trash compacter buzz around like a human, as if specific human needs and desires could be directly translated into the robot world. Instead of a cup of coffee, for example, an energizing zap of solar power gets WALL-E going each morning.

Beyond the animation and the simile, Pixar knows how to tell a great story and WALL-E is no exception. But even beyond the storyline, WALL-E has a message that is more specific and more profound than the average moral truisms expressed in most animated features. The true accomplishment of this film is that it garners the perspective and meaning of the best dystopia stories without losing the Pixar charm.

Comparing Pixar’s nine films is like comparing the SAT scores of Harvard students, but if a comparison had to be done, WALL-E would be somewhere in the middle, perhaps above Cars and A Bug’s Life, but below Finding Nemo and Toy Story. WALL-E might not be quite as endearing or constantly engaging as some of the others, but its strength of message bumps it up a few notches. Like all Pixar films, this is definitely a movie to see again and again.