Wall-E

Pixar is one of the best animation film studio in the business. This company simply doesn’t know how to make anything less than excellence. Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Cars… Man, all brilliant movies… So whenever a new Pixar film is in development, it instantly gets my attention, and Wall-E was no exception to that rule.

When i stepped into the cinema hall, my expectations were skyhigh and i’m happy to say that this movie lived up to its hype and my expectations.

The new short “Presto” that precedes the movie is fantastic. I about an arrogant magician and his hungry rabbit. The entire audience was roaring with laughter by the end.

Wall-E opens with a what seems like Earth as it is now, only with lots of trash floating around the stratosphere. The year is 2700, and planet Earth has long been uninhabitable. On closer observation, the skyscrapers that we see, are actually towers of compact trash cubes stacked together by WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class). This little robot was left behind along with plenty others of his kind but he seems to be the only one “alive” (along with his pet cockroach). All the people in the world (assuming) are up in a Noah’s Ark of sort, called the Axiom, roaming up in outer space awaiting the day that Earth is cleared of rubbish by WALL-Es.

The Hero of our Movie, the last Wall-E spends his lonely hours sifting through garbage to collect items of interest, compacting garbage, and storing it in cubes. He collects remnants of humanity to keep for his own amusement. Zippo lighters, Bubble Sheets, Rubik’s Cubes, Christmas lights: these are what Wall-E surrounds himself with. He watches Hello, Dolly! on an iPod that he somehow hooked up to a VCR, emulating the dancing and learning about love.  When you see Wall-E try to imitate the dancing using a hub cap he collected just for that purpose, you know that this is more than a piece of machinery. Proving Pixar’s raison d’etre, this little silent robot has more humanity in him than most movie characters played by actual humans. WALL-E is one of the cutest Pixar hero ever, despite the fact that he’s a trash compactor with eyes. A story centering on a wordless robot could be cold and uninviting, but not in Pixar’s capable hands. Never has a robot been this compassionate: WALL-E’s got heart. And that makes his so lovable!

Things change drastically for WALL-E the day EVE shows up. She is slick and futuristic and quite obviously a girl; WALL-E falls in love almost immediately. It turns out EVE has been sent from the Axiom to scan the earth for signs of habitable life. Their convincing courtship is done completely without dialogue, quite a feat for sound designer Ben Burtt who found a way to make ambient noise into recognizable words for WALL-E. Trying to impress the cooly modern EVE, WALL-E shows her the seedling he found, at which point EVE goes into a hibernation state and awaits the return of her spaceship. WALL-E, of course, cannot abide by his beloved EVE’s status and hitches a ride into space to save her. And, thus begins the story. At the end of which Wall-E saves the Earth and Humans!

A bit disturbingly, all the humans on the Axiom have regressed to babyhood (enormously fat, with little bone density) after 700 years of living up in space and drinking their meals through a straw. Though WALL-E’s only aim on the Axiom is to find his beloved EVE, he finds himself wrapped up in a race to save the seedling he collected on earth from the treacherous tentacles of Auto.

When your two main characters (Wall-E and EVE) have about 90% of the screen time, and each basically only ever say “Wall-E” or “Eva”, the burden for storytelling falls onto the shoulders of the character performances (animation) and the art of visual storytelling. Wall-E communicates worlds of information to the audience without ever saying a word just by how perfectly and beautifully he’s animated. His movements, his expression and his very nature are the tools by which this story is told without the use of words (there is dialog in the film from some other characters… but the majority of the movie is told by just watching and experiencing Wall-E himself).

While on the surface it’s a movie about robots and spaceships set centuries in the future, deep down it’s about humanity and its place on Earth and in the universe. It uses its out-of-this-world settings and characters as a lens to reflect our own world back at us, showing us both the beauty and the ugliness of our existence through the eyes of a guileless, trash-compacting robot. Wall-E is worth your every rupee. It is funny in ways that are actually bittersweet, reminding us of our sad fate in time to come if we stop doing anything about pollution, global warming and all that nonsense that will eventually turn Earth into an uninhabitable sphere of trash.

Andrew Stanton, who won an Oscar in 2004 for Finding Nemo, with WALL-E, he has taken not only the art of animation, but the art of storytelling to new, unimaginable heights.

In a movie season that’s overpopulated with superhero movies, remakes and sequels, it’s incredibly refreshing to see a movie that stands on its own as a completely new and unique creation. You wud’ve never seen anything like Wall-E, and you might not see anything like it again. Go. Go see it as soon as you can.

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