“Watching Pixar’s animated film “WALL-E” must be a humbling experience for other filmmakers, because it demonstrates not just the number but the variety of ideas you need to make a terrific movie.” David Denby
Opening Scene
WALL-E and Eve dance in space
Review
Watching Pixar’s animated film “WALL-E” must be a humbling experience for other filmmakers, because it demonstrates not just the number but the variety of ideas you need to make a terrific movie. “WALL-E,” which was directed by Andrew Stanton and written by Stanton and John Reardon, has the waggish adorableness and the tripping-and-falling roughhouse of other animated films. But it’s also a work of tragic nostalgia. In the ruins of a great American city, WALL-E, a robotic trash collector and compactor, continues to go about his duties after the human presence has been blown away by billowing waves of noxious dust. Accompanied only by a cockroach, WALL-E trolls among the detritus of the vanished culture; the junk items he finds become fetishes for him. He holds on to plastic forks, hubcaps, and Zippo lighters, and throws away a diamond ring while keeping the felt box (he likes containers). He lives in a steel garbage dump that is at once home, arcade, archeological museum, and church. Among his collection lies not a recording of “Messiah” or of Beethoven’s Ninth but a tape of the 1969 musical “Hello, Dolly!,” a movie considered lumbering and out of date when it opened. And what he watches again and again is not the famous Louis Armstrong–Barbra Streisand duet but a wan little love song, “It Only Takes a Moment”—with skinny Michael Crawford holding Marianne McAndrew’s hand—and the routine dance production number “Put on Your Sunday Clothes.” When a spaceship shows up and leaves behind a female robot named EVE, he woos her with the determination of a man possessed by a lyrical impulse. A bad old movie keeps the human idea alive in two robots.
The ironies move toward satire when the two travel to EVE’s home, a space station called the Axiom, where, it turns out, the remaining humans have been living for seven hundred years in a totalitarian paradise run by a giant big-box-store company, Buy N Large. The visual invention is both excruciatingly funny and haunting. Back on earth, the disused skyscrapers look like Utah monuments worn away by time and weather. The interior of the Axiom is clean and bright, in a style that might be called cruise-liner moderne with a serious touch of food-court classicism. Consumer capitalism, having taken complete control of life, decorates in pinks and blues—a soothing milieu for humans who are too fat to move on their own and who travel in comfortably bedded little hovercrafts in which screens, constantly switched on, stand in front of their faces. The robots on the Axiom include a fussy, muttering little droid who scarfs up any contaminating substance (such as soil from Earth), and squadrons of square-shouldered helots who try to squash the slightest sign of free will. “WALL-E” blends two kinds of science fiction—the post-apocalyptic disaster scenario and the dystopian fantasy derived from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which people are controlled not by coercion but by pleasure. Apparently, the movie has caused annoyance in some quarters because it criticizes the American way of life. This it does, and with suavity and supreme good humor. “WALL-E” is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible.
Stills
