AN ADVENTURE BEYOND THE ORDINAR•E.
Directors Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter hatched the idea for this film even before Toy Story had finished production back in 1995. After the premiere of Stanton’s Finding Nemo in 2003, the project started in earnest. Wall•E has now become a symbol of the kind of maturity that Pixar achieved over the years, both intellectually and creatively.
Startled by the arrival of a spaceship
Earth, 2805. No humans live on the planet anymore, only cockroaches and Wall•E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter • Earth class), a trash compactor robot. He spends his days salvaging whatever interesting objects he can find in the piles of garbage that’s basically covering Earth. One day he’s startled by the arrival of a spaceship that lands on the planet and deploys a probe that curiously travels around the place looking for signs of life, blasting to pieces anything that looks like a threat. Wall•E has reason to approach the probe with caution, but he soon learns that it has a feminine demeanor and a name, EVE. He takes her home to his truck where she discovers a seedling in a pot, the kind of life sign that she’s programmed to bring back to the spaceship. EVE stores the plant inside her, activates a homing beacon and is automatically deactivated.
WALL•E falls in love with the probe, even though it is now completely unresponsive, and takes loving care of it. When the spaceship returns, WALL•E is heartbroken to learn that it has come to collect EVE. As it departs, the robot clings to the spaceship, hoping to reunite with his loved one.
Masterful first part
The fact that Fred Willard appears as a real human being, not an animated character, is intriguing, perhaps a way of making 21st century audiences understand that he belongs to a time (not far from our own) when the waste and excessive consumerism began to hurt our planet for real. Not every part of the message is crystal clear: why would humans have stopped using their legs in the future and be almost completely unaware of the Earth’s history? But that aspect of the script is the film’s only drawback. The first part of it is masterful, featuring only the two robots and a cockroach WALL•E has befriended. These scenes of WALL•E’s day-to-day life and the subsequent romance between him and EVE have no dialogue but are beautifully rendered, at times reminding us of Jacques Tati, not least thanks to the message of the film.
What we do hear is Thomas Newman’s fine score – and Ben Burtt’s wonderful sound effects. This is the first movie where he’s a major star, even providing his voice to the lead character; Burtt’s work here evokes many of his previous classic efforts from, above all, the Star Wars franchise. WALL•E himself is cleverly designed, although he is essentially “E.T. 2”, as his voice, color and big eyes one easily falls in love with all remind us of the homesick alien. The Earth and space locations have a clarity and beauty that is stunning and utterly persuasive; the crudely designed humans that WALL•E encounters in space are a deliberately comical contrast.
Finding similarities to Finding Nemo in the story is easy as two companions embark on a great adventure in the vast unknown; the mix of slapstick and heartfelt emotions works just as well here.
Ambitions are admirably high. Some viewers harboring a distaste for everything Hollywood will think less of this film for its crowd-pleasing sentimentality. But your mind has to be pretty poisoned not to appreciate the tender humanity of the machines in contrast with the ghostly desolation of Earth and the soulless, chairbound people in space.
Wall•E 2008-U.S. Animated. 97 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Jim Morris. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Screenplay: Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon. Music: Thomas Newman. Song: “Down to Earth” (Peter Gabriel, Thomas Newman). Cast: Fred Willard (Shelby Forthright). Voices of Ben Burtt (Wall•E/M-O), Elissa Knight (EVE), Jeff Garlin (Captain McCrea), John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver.
Trivia: Co-executive produced by John Lasseter. Cinematographer Roger Deakins was hired as a consultant on lighting. The short feature BURN-E (2008) is a companion piece to this film.
Oscar: Best Animated Feature Film. BAFTA: Best Animated Film. Golden Globe: Best Animated Feature Film.
Last word: “[Deakins] came up on a weekend and it was so inspiring. I know, for him, it’s just like A, B and C, but for us, I think that’s his gift because he’s able to take very complex problems and sort of find a simple solution for them. It’s so deceivingly simple, these answers. Just put the light here, put the camera there. We were so inspired we asked him to stay for a couple more weeks and advise our director of photography, which is actually separated by two roles: the camera and the lighting are two different people, Daniel Feinberg and Jeremy Lasky. They basically hung out every day and any meeting that I was in with them, just to get a gist of how they work. He got it very quickly and really gave these, ‘Well, if it were me, this is what I would do,” kinds of things in conversation. It was really, really helpful and we were at a point where we were not tying it down yet but trying to figure out what the look and the feel of the movie should be, and it was just this perfect sweet spot that he visited. It was great.” (Stanton, Collider)
