THE STORY – WALL-E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class, is the last robot left on Earth. He spends his days tidying up the planet, one piece of garbage at a time. But during 700 years, WALL-E has developed a personality, and he’s more than a little lonely. Then he spots EVE, a sleek and shapely probe sent back to Earth on a scanning mission. Smitten WALL-E embarks on an adventure when he follows EVE across the galaxy.
THE CAST – Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy & Sigourney Weaver
THE TEAM – Andrew Stanton (Director/Writer) & Jim Reardon (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
Many measure the Golden Age of Pixar Animation by a famous lunch the creatives of the studio had in 1994. A lunch in which the films from the first “Toy Story” through “Up” were all born out of. Of this legendary lunch and this legendary run of films, many have become classics. Still, none have had the prestigious artistic legacy that Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” has maintained in its nearly twenty-year lifespan. Between winning critics’ prizes in its year’s awards season to just a few years ago being the first Pixar and most mainstream animated film added to the Criterion Collection, something about the film’s themes and artistry has run deeper than even other top-tier Pixar fare. Between the iconic and adorable lead character, the palpable romance, the depth of the visuals, and the prescience of the film’s science fiction world, there is much to admire and explore with Pixar’s magnum opus.
One of the great strengths of the studio in this era of films was the distinct voices of each film. Between this and “Finding Nemo,” Andrew Stanton’s two films in this era feel massive in their scale. The world feels infinite and exciting, but the image’s depth never distracts from the heart of his lead characters. Wall-E (voiced by legendary sound designer Ben Burtt), a literal waste robot, was the last thing left active on Earth when humanity evacuated to space. He is left alone with a cockroach, mountains of trash, and little trinkets that keep him busy. A life he is absolutely content with and finds the beauty in, and the dichotomy of the dirty, lifeless world he is alone in, with the wonder he has for the stars above, and the Technicolor musicals he can watch, make him an instantly endearing protagonist. These qualities only accelerate when a newer, slick, and smart robot named EVE is sent down to Earth, a robot whom Wall-E instantly falls in love with. Despite their mechanical exteriors, there’s something so human and tangible about their romance. You can easily place yourself or people you know into this dynamic: the shy, rusty persona yearning for someone they find unattainably beautiful but instinctively connected to. Beyond being adorable, it is so applicable to relationships we know from cinema, old and new. It has a Chaplin quality, both in the characters’ limited dialogue and the mystical lens in which Wall-E views love and EVE as a romantic prospect.
The gorgeous animation does so much to bring many of the film’s attributes to life. Not just in the obvious sense, but in the amount of visual contradictions it offers. The dull colors of modern Earth, contrasted with the bright vibrancy of the films Wall-E watches, make his escape feel all the more necessary. The detailed dirt and rust of Wall-E versus the smooth white of EVE. The whole first half of the film uses little to no dialogue, and the way the film pulls this off and engages us in its world and lead character is miraculous. The soundscape, heavily influenced by classic science fiction films and aided greatly by Thomas Newman’s delicate, soaring score, is instrumental in immersing us in the world Stanton and co-writer Jim Reardon have created. The confidence to tell so much of the story this way is so indicative of the stature Pixar held at the time and is incredibly rewarding in the film itself. Once we get up into space to meet the humans, the way the colors in the space paradise (the Axium) have a sort of unappealing corporate color palette is quite prescient. The overly clean, minimalist design has a very modern lack of distinctiveness we now associate with Apple products or Chipotle restaurants. A lifelessness that makes the browns of the rotting Earth feel like a paradise in comparison, for at least offering some life.
That leads to one of the big discussions around the film in recent years: the predictions it made that have come true since. While many years have passed, and I have criticized the second half of the film as weaker than the first, it is in the second half that the film’s foresight is most impressive. While any film or story can, by coincidence, predict things, there’s an intelligence to the film’s depiction of the future that makes the way it’s aged far more impressive. The depiction of humans’ struggles to connect and how technology takes advantage of that is a story as old as technology’s integration into society. The film’s vision of humans stuck in chairs, fed and entertained by robots, with other humans as mere obstacles to their own pleasures, feels like we’re rapidly accelerating towards a path drawn out long ago.
“Wall-E” is a film about avoided connections, about the feelings of touching the soil that makes our home planet, of holding another person’s hand, and about how those feelings are worth cherishing. The more we lose sight of those core human connections, the more we lose sight of our own humanity, a case even applicable to two robots. With the threats technology poses now, there’s something really powerful about seeing two robots embrace humanity for a change.
