While the men are away, the machines will play. We're talking about the Earth in this case, which has been abandoned by humanity for the better part of seven centuries with mechanized drones left behind to sweep up the mess and maybe, possibly, find love somewhere in the aftermath. Wall-E's opening act is Pixar at its finest, playing with raw pantomime and rich expression during a solid forty minutes' screen time with little or no dialog.
The dire, desolate setting of our planet's future is unnerving, a vast stretch of crumbling skyscrapers and wind-swept fast food wrappers, but we can't get too down in the dumps about it because the one little refuse-collecting bot at the center of it all is so deeply enamored with the place. Amidst evidence of the very worst of human nature, we're also reminded of its most redeeming qualities, and experience many of them through fresh eyes. Wall-E takes the time to appreciate things that our obsessively screen-gazing descendants miss (an uncomfortably prescient prediction, that) and, as we're along for the ride with him this time, we do, too.
Spirited, fantastical sci-fi with an artist's heart and a clear message. It's ten years old, but it looks like it could've been released ten minutes ago.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-03-16T15:06:04Z
[7.4/10] A trash compactor falls in love with an iPod. If you strip away the space adventure, the social commentary, and the slapstick, that’s what WALL-E comes down to, and it’s the film’s most impressive feat and best mode. Director Andrew Stanton and company take one little robot, seemingly cobbled together from spare parts on a trash planet, who nurses a crush on another, far more clean and advanced robot, and makes it the most endearing romance in the world.
To add to the level of difficulty in making that type of love story work, neither of these robots can say much more than their names and a few muddled words. That means every stage of their relationship has to be captured in looks, gestures, and most importantly choices. It’s the efforts that WALL-E and EVE to protect, rescue, and care for one another that makes their little concordance so heartening and so resonant.
With that, arguably the film’s greatest challenge becomes its greatest asset. Dialogue can be a crutch in love stories. It’s all too easy to have characters announce that they’ve fallen in love, declare their emotions from one scene to the next, and all but tell the audience what they’re supposed to feel. While that approach makes these stories easy to follow, it also makes them hollow, built more on labels than substance.
WALL-E cannot rely on such shortcuts. Instead it communicates the little trash-bot’s longing for companionship through, of all things, a VHS of Hello Dolly!. It shows his nervous following of EVE when she arrives and his adorably chaste desire to hold her hand. It shows EVE’s annoyance turned bemusement turned frustration turned appreciation as she meets WALL-E, watches as he helps and hinders her mission, and then realizes the lengths he went to find and protect her when she was in stasis. And it shows EVE going to equal and opposite lengths to save and fix WALL-E, tugging on the audience’s heartstrings every step of the way.
The film uses these acts of kindness, the surprisingly expressive head tilts and movements of the bots themselves, and the unshowy companionship that grows through helping one another through shared difficulties, to make this strange, artificial romance feel like the most real, human, and touching one in all creation.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for the parts of the movie that don’t center on the affections between the two little robo-love birds. The rest of the movie is rife with social commentary, partly on wasteful (and ultimately destructive) consumerism and partly on the stultifying effects of screens and other time- and effort-saving technology. Both are fine but not particularly inspired, making dime store observations and extrapolations that are fit for a kids movie but as deep as the themes Pixar normally keeps on tap.
The former at least makes for a visually distinctive setting. WALL-E depicts a version of Planet Earth where one mega-corporation, called Buy n Large, had taken over and the endless pursuit of stuff in its shadow left the world in ruin. The planet is riddled with the neverending detritus of centuries ago, providing both the backdrop for WALL-E’s adventures and his basic mission.
You see, WALL-E has been tasked by the same megacorp to clean up this mess while humanity travels through space. The garbage-gunked planet makes for an amusing setting. The little trash-bot can tunnel through scads of leftover junk, scavenging things he likes, puzzling at the proper use of bras and lightbulbs (a la The Little Mermaid), and zooming through creatively-constructed landscapes humanity’s decaying, ad-ridden infrastructure. As a playground and locale, the wasteland is a winner.
But as a social critique, it’s pretty blunt and not particularly deep. The same enforced subtlety that helps make WALL-E and EVE’s romance so compelling is missing from the film’s jibes at modern consumer culture. Its anti-consumerism, environmentalist message is simple and loud, despite the mostly wordless opening segment. The same goes for its criticisms of modern day laziness and the risk that technological creature comforts will all but rob us of our humanity.
WALL-E is a paean to the notion of being active, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. It presents a universe where taking action is rewarded, whether it’s WALL-E and EVE going to the nigh-literal ends of the Earth to save one another, to a pair of doughy humans breaking out of their hover chairs and experiencing life directly rather than through a screen, or from the captain of a spaceship seizing control back from the autopilot to take humanity home.
If there’s an enduring message from the film, one that rises above the overdone and oversimplified points of critique (which I happen to agree with) that otherwise drag down the film, it’s the notion not to live one’s life on autopilot. WALL-E’s arrival disrupts so many people’s plans and missions and formulas they use to go through their daily lives, whether it’s EVE’s or the couple’s or the Captain’s or even the little cleaning robot. But each’s life is made better by WALL-E arriving to nudge them off the straight lines they’ve each been following, in one form or another, for centuries. Make choices, scrap your complacency, and live your realest, most undefined life, the movie seems to say. There are far worse morals for a film to impart.
But when it depicts humanity as having become a pack of bloated, ad-obeying screen zombies, floating via hover chairs through a fantastical cruise ship, the obviousness of this overprojection blunts the impact of the statement the movie wants to make. The laudable message the movie wants to communicate about the road that over-screening and giving up all volition and agency in the name of modern convenience is lost in the ridiculousness and bluntness of the worst case scenario it imagines.
And yet, in the end, amid the usual kids movie slapstick and miscalibrated social commentary, is one of film’s sweetest little romances. It’s telling that in many films, the plot can make no sense, the characters can seem off, the writing can be bad, but if we buy the affectionate connection between two characters, it can still become a favorite.
WALL-E does not sink to those levels. The team at Pixar still knows how to craft some dazzling sequences, some cute physical comedy, and endearing characters who burrow into your heart in a series of bleeps and bloops. But the film’s crowning achievement, the thing that makes it worth remembering seven-hundred years in the future when a trash-bot cues it up instead of Hello Dolly!, is the way it captures a love in ones and zeroes, forged in garbage, and no less enduring.