WALL·E
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Written by Andrew Stanton
and Jim Reardon
Featuring the voices
of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight
and Jeff Garlin
Classification: G
****
All kinds of science-fiction stories have imagined Earth as a ruined planet, rendered uninhabitable by human folly. Before WALL·E, the latest tour de force from Pixar Animation Studios, those stories weren't targeted at seven-to-12-year-olds. As audacious as it is, a post-apocalyptic robot love story for children is consistent with Hollywood's most creative studio, which has raided the garbage heap for inspiration with stories of cast-off toys (Toy Story and Toy Story 2), used cars (Cars) and vermin (A Bug's Life, Ratatouille).
While other studios plan their stories around marketing research, director-driven Pixar continues to invent worlds and invites the audience into them. Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.
There are few film sequences, animated or live action, that are as melancholy as the opening of WALL·E, in which our ruined planet is first seen from an aerial perspective: a desert-brown world, devoid of vegetation but covered in rubble. About 700 years have passed since humans, who fell under the control of a hyper-consumerist corporation called Buy N Large, have abandoned the befouled Earth in a cruise spaceship.
As the camera looks down on the abandoned city, a moving figure appears rolling along a cleared pathway through the mess: He's WALL·E (the acronym stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class ), a solar-powered robotic trash compactor with binocular eyes, a bendable neck, a rusty box of a body and treadmill feet. Accompanied by a pet cockroach, he's left holding the planetary fort, repairing himself from boxes of spare parts and creating skyscraper-high stacks of garbage cubes.
The character of WALL·E, conceived back in 1994 even before Toy Story, has a family resemblance to the goose-neck lamp of John Lasseter's 1986 short film Luxo Jr., and some of the same comic mime appeal. WALL·E doesn't exactly talk, though he makes enough noises (courtesy of Ben Burtt, who provided the voice for R2D2 in the Star Wars movies) to get his message across when he finally speaks to someone else.
For most of the first hour of the film, though, he's speechless, which makes WALL·E the closest thing to a silent movie that Pixar has produced. The effect, which echoes Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is thrilling, especially in the movie's first half-hour. We meet WALL·E and his pet cockroach. We see the workshop where he sleeps, keeps his spare parts and watches his favourite VHS tape of Hello, Dolly!, which has programmed him to appreciate the ways of human love.
His skills come in handy with the arrival of a space probe carrying a modern robot called EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a white, blue-eyed figure who looks like a cross between a snowy owl and an air freshener. Skittish and trigger-happy, EVE (voiced by Elissa Knight) has a dangerous tendency to vaporize anything that moves or gets in her way, but once WALL·E survives their initial encounter, they begin to strike sparks (literally, when he shows her a cigarette lighter).
Later, he gives her a single plant sprout, growing up from an old boot. She promptly envelops it into her inner chamber before shutting down in preparation for her return to the Axiom space station where the humans live. WALL·E hitches a ride on the outside of her ship.
If the first hour of WALL·E is poetic, the second is a more conventional, if witty, satire on consumerism. The Axiom is a giant spaceship that houses humanity on a sort of interminable all-you-can-eat luxury cruise. The humans are immensely fat from never exercising, as they float around on mobile chairs, sipping giant drinks and talking to each other through the same transparent video screens they use to play virtual sports.
An army of robots, operating under a central authoritarian computer, does all the work. The job of WALL·E and Eve, in conjunction with a ward full of "rogue robots," is to motivate the ship's lethargic captain (Jeff Garlin) and his fellow humans to take control of their destiny and go back to their home planet.
WALL·E wears its contradictions on its sleeve: Here's an anti-corporate, anti-consumerist message film for kids, many of whom will have their noses buried in the video version of the film, and it's all delivered through the auspices of Disney, no less. Yet it's unquestionably an ethical step up from the vision of endangered species killing each other in Kung Fu Panda. When sorting through the great trash heap of consumer fun, you have to be grateful for any treasure you can find.
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