Wall•E's title character comtemplates his place in the universe
Having reviewed the 1973 animated thinker Fantastic Planet in last week’s issue, I thought my next assignment, Wall•E, would be a cute and harmless mental Tic-Tac compared to FP’s multi-course buffet of dystopian themes. Both are animated, and both could be considered sci-fi... and, well, that’s about where I expected the similarities to end. One is a thought-provoking gem that places humankind in a perilous and hopeless future, while the other, as far as I knew (and from what its pre-release press led me to believe), was about adorable robots. I expected a love story maybe—something like Romeo-Bot and Juliet-Tron.
Yeah. I was way off.
Disney’s Pixar Studios, the folks who brought us feel-good family classics like Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and The Incredibles, now give us a film set in a cold, bleak future where Earth has become a dried-up monument to human consumption and whose only remaining inhabitant (not counting the cockroach who can be spotted scurrying around the corners of the frame) is a long-forgotten and very lonely robot. For the first time ever, Disney goes dystopic... and it’s a wonder to behold!
Wall•E, an unexpectedly dark yet heartwarming masterpiece, throws the audience head-first into an eerily recognizable future where humanity has given up on the hopelessly polluted Earth and escaped into the stars. All that remain are empty husks of the skyscrapers, mini-malls and mega-stores that wound up taking over all aspects of life before mankind’s mass exodus. The sky is a permanent shade of dirty orange and the skyline is littered with mountains of garbage that make up an oddly beautiful (and guilt-inducing) landscape.
It's the job of Wall•E (that’s short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-class) to sort and stack the debris and clear enough space for humanity’s eventual return... which was scheduled to happen 695 years ago. Wall•E is the last of his kind, all the other WALL units lifeless from overwork and disrepair.
But that doesn’t seem to bother the carefree robot who spends his days sorting through Earth, finding little treasures as he goes. Over the centuries, Wall•E has gained an appreciation for the little things: Zippo lighters, rubber duckies, videotapes of bad 1960s musicals, and anything else that catches his robotic eye. When one of his knick-knacks turns out to be the key to mankind’s survival, Wall•E becomes Earth’s last hope. And along with everyone he comes into contact with, he learns that there’s a big difference between what you’re made for and the life you make of yourself.
Wall•E is a great movie, one that’s destined to be a classic, with beautifully detailed animation, a sound design so cool I actually noticed a sound design, and a story that presents a charming yet sobering “what if?” scenario accessible to young and old alike. What left me most impressed was the range of emotions these wordless, faceless characters were capable of, communicating with nothing more than beeps, boops, and blinking LEDs.
In fact, I’d say the “cast” of Wall•E possesses more humanity and depth than any of the real-life actors in The Incredible Hulk or The Happening, further evidence for my theory that Edward Norton and Mark Wahlberg are actually soulless, emotionless robots sent here to destroy us all... but we won’t get into that here.
