Pixar is up to its old tricks again by pulling off the craziest and most daring thing I have ever seen in animation. They have made us believe toys could be real, taken us to worlds of monsters and cars, and made us fall in love with ants, fish and a rat. This year they are taking us into the future and through space with WALL•E.
WALL•E, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, is the last of his kind. Stranded on our earth long after all humans abandoned it due to extreme pollution. He spends his days neatly sorting the trash into giant towers and collecting little tit-bits that interest him as his trusty pet cockroach follows him everywhere. That is until EVE arrives. A slender and many have said iPod looking bot, sent to earth to see if life is sustainable again. Our hero WALL•E immediately falls head over heals for her, but when EVE finds what she is looking for she is called back to the Axiom space station to inform the humans of life on the trash filled earth. WALL•E follows her and his journey through space begins.
Now the really groundbreaking news is that the movie has no dialog besides robotic beeps for the first half an hour of the movie. And even from there the dialog is extremely limited. Although it is pulled off in a spectacular fashion many movie goers may be slightly annoyed by the extreme lack of dialog. Although it provides for a breakthrough in storytelling it may keep a chunk of movie goers at a distance, creating one major movie flaw. As amazing as it is to see movies as art, if the viewer can’t appreciate the art, it has been wasted.
With that in mind, Pixar have managed to pull a beautifully executed love story together, along with adventure, sci-fi, and slap stick comedy. Neatly packaged in the robot whose cute eyes and zest for life will melt even the hardest of hearts. It’s a movie that caters for kids and those who can only see surface deep, but more excitingly it caters for those who see deeper. It challenges our product saturated, over indulging, over polluting ideals. It premieres a love story that grows and blossoms as in the most classic films and takes us into a future that is not only extremely fun but visually amazing.
What worries me, although it’s hard to judge such bold and innovative story telling, is that I don’t know if movie goers are ready for a movie of this calibre, although I may be underestimating how adaptable most movie goers are. If you see this movie for the first time and it just didn’t sit right with you, watch it again there is so much to experience if you just forget about the limited dialog.
8/10
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As a side note, the Pixar short before the movie is one of the most hysterical pieces I have seen. The piece shows a magician and his rabbit that is desperate for his carrot. What follows is fast paced slap stick humour that only Pixar can achieve. It is nothing short of brilliant.
Director
Andrew StantonTrailer
Tags: Allocation, Andrew Stanton, Animation, Earth-Class, Finding Nemo, gallery, humans, Lifter, Load, Marc Williams, movie, review, space, synopsis, Wall E, Waste
