WALL•E (G) Voice talents of: Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, Ben Burtt, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy
Since Toy Story opened in 1995 Pixar has consistently upped the ante for animated features. It has also spawned its share of sub-par imitators.
Pixar has favoured the excellent over the mediocre (its last feature Ratatouille even celebrated this as its theme). Excellent storytelling and excellent characterisation are a Pixar hallmark.
Pixar’s latest feature continues this unbroken trend of brilliantly-executed films. Its premise is simple, but the ideas encapsulated in the story could fill a textbook.
WALL•E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class) has laboured, recycling parts of himself, for 700 years in order to fulfil his purpose, to collect human refuse, a faithful cockroach his only companion.
His daily routine consists of compacting rubbish and constructing massive skyscrapers of garbage. The Earth has become a wasteland of towering rubbish dumps —its surface given over to the ravages of human excess.
One day WALL•E comes across a tiny plant which he collects and takes back to his collection of other oddities. WALL•E finds all sorts of gizmos that give him hints about how humans thought and felt.
His most telling prize is a VHS tape of Hello, Dolly, which he watches incessantly — and from which he learns something of love and loneliness.
His mundane existence gets much more interesting with the arrival of EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) — a sleek probe robot sent to evaluate whether earth can sustain life.
WALL•E’s plant means her prime directive is at last fulfilled.
Meanwhile, the humans on the space station Axiom from which EVE has been sent have grown fat, languid, and disconnected; victims of their own consumerism and, indeed, “consumed” by the hi-tech machines around them.
It’s up to WALL•E and EVE to save humanity from itself.
Director Andrew Stanton has said the heart of this film is about loneliness and the search for connection, which humanity has lost through its reliance on technology and consumption and by which WALL•E is fascinated — he yearns for connection through his collection of found objects, which remind him of humans.
WALL•E and EVE are an amazing feat of character design and animation. Indeed the world created for this film is both wondrous and a little scary at the same time.
This is science fiction the way science fiction is meant to be. It creates a world that’s clearly not our own, but it’s totally believable as humanity’s destination.
Yet the film is not cynical or misanthropic; like the best sci-fi, it uses its imaginative conceits to ask big questions about our world.
It’s a movie about connection amid chaos, about the dangers of unchecked greed and the forces that overcome it.
This is not a political movie. It’s not really a message film. The environment needs to be taken care of and rampant consumption may kill us, but these aren’t political statements: they are basic common sense observations.
“Truth isn’t always pretty, truth isn’t always fair, and truth isn’t always inviting,” Stanton told Christianity Today recently.
“But when you tap into it the right way you can’t ignore it, and it touches you to your core. That’s what I’m a junkie for when I see a great movie or hear a great story told, and that’s what I’m really trying to go for when I’m doing any kind of story.”
Fearless and complex, this story will engage all age groups.
ADRIAN DRAYTON
Listen to or download a podcast of ADRIAN DRAYTON speaking with director Andrew Stanton here and legendary sound designer and voice of WALL•E, Ben Burtt here.
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WALL•E
