"Wall-E" - spoiler movie review (also includes review of "Presto" short)

I wasn't on board with Wall-E from the first second I saw him like I know happened with some other people. And I'm not one of those who necessarily loves everything Pixar does - I wasn't that enamoured of "Cars" and "The Incredibles". But after seeing the first real trailer, I was hooked. He was funny and cute and lovable. And I couldn't wait to see the movie. But true to form, when I become seriously invested in a film, I'm usually wanting toys. And boy were there toys galore. And great toys at that. Toys that I wanted bad enough to go hunting for them at multiple stores.

And then I worried about being over-saturated. There were longer trailers of the movie being shown on TV, but I avoided them. I didn't want to know any more about the movie - I knew enough. I just wanted to see it. And I wondered if I was setting myself up for a let-down because I was so excited to see this movie.

I was not let down in the least. Some of the cute bits (like the bra over his eyes and the fire extinguisher blowing him backgrounds on the ground and Eve trying to blast the heck out of him as he hid behind a rock) were ho-hum now that I'd seen that footage so many times in trailers, but there was so much more to enjoy.

The movie is the story of Wall-E (waste allocation load lifter - earth class), who is alone (mostly) on planet Earth. Consumerism has run totally amok (I wonder if they reached the shoe event horizon as well), making the planet uninhabitable, so the humans have left for a luxurious life in space, leaving behind a planetful of trash. Wall-E's job is to process the trash, scooping it into his little body, compacting it into a cube, and then stacking all the cubes into giant high-rises. Wall-E's only companion is a pet cockaroach, and an old VHS tape of "Hello Dolly", until the mysterious appearance of a ship that leaves robot Eve (extraterrestrial vegetation evaluator), who Wall-E immediately falls in love with. Eve is much less receptive to a friendship, but she thaws when Wall-E saves her from a storm and takes her back to his trailer shelter, where he shows her all his treasures. One particular treasure, a plant that Wall-E had discovered, scooped up and deposited into an old boot, triggers a programmed reaction in Eve, which eventually leads to her being picked up again by the ship, with Wall-E as the stowaway on the hull. The ship goes back to the Axiom, mega-company Buy N Large's luxurious space yacht, but life aboard the yacht is not as idyllic as the promotional films had shown. Wall-E and Eve find an unlikely ally in the ship's captain to accomplish the mission of getting the ship and its inhabitants to return home to Earth.

Since Wall-E is obviously the one the audience is supposed to connect to and identify with, the movie does a good job of spending the early part of the film establishing his character. While he does talk a bit later, mostly saying his own name and Eve's, most of his verbal communication is done with tones and beeps and intonation, which coupled with his eye and body movements gets his point across. We see that Wall-E is not your ordinary programmed bot. He has apparently managed to train the cockaroach, and even though his job is to process the trash that has resulted from the runaway consumerism, he rescues bits and pieces that he collects and keeps back in his trailer. There doesn't necessarily seem to be a pattern of what catches his fancy that prompts him to collect it. He has a sort of ferris wheel contraption with compartments that hold the items he has decided to keep, and there's a funny bit where he has brought back a spork and he can't decide whether it should go in the cup of spoons or the cup of forks, so he ends up laying the spork in between the two.

Eve's arrival seems to be the answer to Wall-E's problem of being lonely, and he watches her for a while before their actual meeting takes place - brokered by the cockaroach no less. Eve's interaction with the cockaroach is the first glimpse into her non-business personality, and it's the cockaroach's familiarity with Wall-E that seems to get Eve to at least accept him. Wall-E's attempt to show Eve what he does (compacting trash followed by an especially funny and triumphant "ta-da" by Wall-E) didn't do much to impress her. It was also funny to see his continued fixation on holding her hand.

I didn't really understand the storms that seem to sweep over the land, but I loved the scene when Wall-E has taken Eve back to his trailer, and he's showing her all of the things he's collected, including a Rubik's Cube. And I was laughing hysterically when Wall-E pops in the video tape of "Hello Dolly" and shows Eve that he can sing and dance along with the video.

When they got to Axiom, the contrast in color and style was so amazing, but we see that nothing has changed. Consumerism and technology have continued to run out of control so that no one even walks anymore, and they even have machines that play sports for them. Everyone has become obese and disconnected and do nothing but watch their screens all day, whether with programming or in talking to others, but even to the point where they're talking to someone on a screen who's actually right next to them. When Wall-E inadvertently causes a couple of accidents resulting in two different people becoming disconnected from their screens, the man and woman seem to come out of a trance and for the first time take note of their surroundings. That reminded me of "THX-1138" when he had stopped taking his meds and was no longer letting the drugs control him.

We meet the current captain of the Axiom, who's really just a figurehead with nothing to do since the ship is run by the autopilot. But Eve's arrival with the plant causes an upheaval since that shows that Earth is now ready to sustain life again, but the bots in control of the ship have been programmed to not allow that to happen. And I'll admit that I didn't even get the "2001" connection until the theme from the film played as the captain stood on his wobbly legs for the first time. However, I loved it later when the captain turns off the autopilot and his light goes out just like Hal's.

When they get back to Earth, Eve rushes Wall-E to his trailer, where there are spare pieces that she uses to replace all his damaged parts. The last thing to replace is his damaged chip - which she then replaces and Wall-E reboots. And then he just stares blankly at Eve, with no hint of recognition. It was really interesting to see how animated and full of personality he was before, but with the same design, he was not really just a programmed bot. It was especially heartbreaking to watch him compact the treasures he had previously brought into his trailer, but now, he was back to just being a trash bot. The only complaint I really had with the entire film was how they brought Wall-E back to being himself. It took me a second to realize that his personality had changed because he now had a different chip, which effectively meant he was a different bot. Changing out an eye like he had earlier wasn't going to matter, but changing the chip was basically changing out his brain - of course he wasn't going to remember anything, including Eve. Obviously, you can't end the movie that way, but his transformation back into the Wall-E we knew didn't really work for me. There was no explanation for that, and even Eve holding his hand wasn't enough. I would have liked some kind of throwaway indication that he had some kind of internal memory chip where most of his personality had been stored, and it just took a few minutes for that to be copied over onto the normal chip. Otherwise, the sudden return of his memory seemed forced and unexplainable.

I did find it interesting that Pixar, a company who has been at the forefront of technology and innovation when it comes to computer-animated movies, created a movie that actually warned about the dangers of technology and automation. However, in the end, it is the combined efforts of humans and bots that ends up activating the program that brings them all back to Earth as well as that enables them to re-colonize the Earth. It's also a bit ironic that the film seems to warn against the detrimental effects of ultraconsumerism, but the film itself has led to the release of quite a bit of movie-related merchandise.

I thought the environmental message of the film was ok and not too overbearing, but mostly, I really enjoyed the humour and heart of the film. I found myself laughing through much of the film, and sometimes, they were at bigger, more obvious moments, and other times, it was just little things, and there were a lot of little things. It was funny to see Wall-E hang up his treads after a hard day at work, and he's really groggy in the morning when he wakes up, until he has his burst of energy, which in his case is not caffeine, but rather, sunlight to recharge his battery.

When Wall-E was making his way back to his trailer the first time, it was pretty creepy to watch him roll by all the other Wall-E bots that have since broken down and lay in bits. It was funny, though, when he saw them, saw that one of them at least had better treads than him, and he even stuck his "foot" up to make sure it was the right size!

I think it's difficult to make a cockaroach cute, especially one that actually looks like a cockaroach, but they did as good a job as I think possible. It was also funny and fitting that of course it would be a cockaroach who is the only living thing on the planet (at least that we know of), and it survives what both Wall-E and Eve do to it. The cockaroach was also a good way of showing the difference between the Wall-E we knew and the Wall-E with the new chip because of the difference in reactions between the two when the cockaroach is run over. However, I'm not sure I can ever, *ever*, EVER eat another Twinkie again for the rest of my life. Ewwwwww.

Because there's not much dialogue in the film, there aren't too many vocal performances, but those that were there were all around terrific. Jeff Garlin does the voice of the captain, and he's not someone I've ever heard of, but he did a good job. Pixar mainstay John Ratzenberger plays the man who gets released from his trance first, and Kathy Najimy plays the woman who is similiarly liberated by Wall-E. Sigourney Weaver provides the voice of the ship's computer, which we hear mostly as the ship's captain is learning more and more about Earth, including about the pizza trees. And Fred Willard is the only live-action character, doing a hilarious turn as the CEO of Buy N Large. But the star of the show, the god of sound, is Ben Burtt, the "voice" of Wall-E (as well as M.O.) Ben Burtt is the genius sound designer (I'm wondering if that title was originally created especially because of him) that most notably created the "voice" of R2-D2, even though he was pretty much responsible for much of the sound that we now associate with "Star Wars". The body movements of Wall-E did a lot to show his character, but it's also in the sounds and tones that he emits, just as was the case with R2.

I loved the scenes of Wall-E and Eve flying around in space, but I did wonder exactly how much was in the fire extinguisher cannister to let him fly for that long.

I didn't see any of the normal in-jokes that you find in Pixar films, but the film is so visually stunning and full that it's hard to see everything. I'm thinking there might be a lot of hidden things to see in all the sequences where the residents of Axiom are zipping around, not to mention all the things that Wall-E has collected. I'm one who normally watches the credits, but there was so much going on during the credits that I barely really paid attention to the credits. Oh, and as cute as Wall-E was, those Wall-A machines were kinda creepy, but that's probably having mostly to do with their imposing size.

I loved the character of M.O. (microbe obliterator), whose job is to detect "foreign contaminants" and clean up after them, and who finds Wall-E to be a great challenge indeed, chasing him around the ship and cleaning up his tread marks. It's a great scene when the M.O. first encounters Wall-E, cleaning up the dirt he left as Wall-E watches. When all is clean, Wall-E sticks out his treads to make a new mark, which M.O. cleans up. And then, showing a mischievious streak to Wall-E, he runs over the M.O., leaving a dirty tread mark on his head. A friend that we saw the movie with said she thought of me during that part. I'm not sure how to take that! But, I do apparently share Wall-E's penchant for collecting "junk", so I guess she might not be too far off the mark.

There is also a great new song by Peter Gabriel that plays over the end credits of the film.


The film is off to a good start at the box office. Variety is reporting that the film earned $23 million on Friday, which is Pixar's best opening day ever.


In the list of Pixar releases, I would put "Wall-E" as my second favorite, tied with "Ratatouille". Both are incredible films, but with totally different styles and stories that I can't really decide which I like better. It's probably not surprising that I like "Wall-E" so much since it's written (and directed) by Andrew Stanton, who also wrote "Monsters, Inc.", my favorite Pixar film, and who wrote the story for and directed "Finding Nemo", probably third on my list of Pixar films.

Since everyone does this, here's my list of the Pixar films in order of preference:

Monsters, Inc.
Ratatouille/Wall-E
Finding Nemo
Toy Story 2
Toy Story
The Incredibles
Cars
A Bug's Life


Preceding the film was the new Pixar short "Presto", about a magician who has a magic hat from which he pulls the perennial rabbit, but in this case, the rabbit is completely distracted by being hungry, and his hunger makes him a bit testy. "Don't make me hungry. You won't like me when I'm hungry." Hmmm, maybe that line was more appropriate for the rabbit in the short instead! As with the previous short "Lifted", this one is full of humour and clever bits (like poking the magician's eyes with his own fingers!).


I am impressed that in 2008, a movie (and an animated one at that) is so heavily influenced by "2001" and "THX-1138" and uses "Hello Dolly" as an integral part of the storyline, and it even manages to touch on the very popular subject of global conservation, and all the while injecting a ton of humour and heart. "Wall-E" is definitely a film that I want to see again while it's still in theatres, and it's also a DVD that I will be excited to add to my collection.