By Jonathan Fisher, September 22nd, 2008
The little robot returns to his big storage area at night, puts on Hello Dolly and dances using a rubbish bin-lid as a prop for a hat. He tucks his arms, legs and head into his little shell of a body and switches himself off to sleep. The next day, he switches himself on and goes to work sifting through the endless amount of garbage each day, before returning to his home, playing with the assorted treasures he has found during the course of his work and switching himself off for the night. All alone.
And so it has gone for little Wall*E (Waste Allocation Lifter Earth Class), presumably for hundreds of years as it has been 700 years since humans left Earth because it became too polluted. It seems that Wall*E is the only robot of his kind that still works -- as he wanders the streets of the abandoned cities, we see thousands of 'dead' robots of his model. The makers of Wall*E consulted the esteemed cinematographer Roger Deakins, asking him how he would light the film if it were being made in live-action. His advice worked. The movie beams with authenticity, it is not merely a matter of replicating real life (something Beowulf tried to do last year, and failed) but creating a universe of its own, albeit one that we might recognise.
One day Wall*E's existence is interrupted by the arrival of a sleek spaceship that produces a sleek robot named Eve. Wall*E is initially perplexed by Eve, but eventually decides that he has a raging crush on her. His pursuit of Eve is rich with humour, romance, and a whole bunch of 'aw' moments. After a sequence of events too complicated to explain here (and too delightful for me to ruin the surprise for you), Wall*E finds himself aboard the spacecraft and eventually is taken to a space station containing the humans that had to leave Earth hundreds of years earlier because our efforts to poison it succeeded with flying colours.
The film has copped some flak for the portrayal of the humans in the space station. They are all large and bloated, do not have the ability to walk (they rely on what look like reclining segueways) and never tear their eyes away from computer screens that perpetually hover a few inches from their faces. The film, some argue, tells us that obesity breeds stupidity. I don't see it like that. What I think the film is saying is that our current society is obsessed with more, more, more. We all have our indulgences that have become the focus of our lives, even if we don't realise it -- be it food, material possessions, or the cyborgisation (I'm pretty sure I made that word up) of our lives through technological advances. What Wall*E argues, gently and sweetly and without pretension or pomposity, is that if we took a step back we would see that we really are living in the Garden of Eden.
Apart from the plot involving the humans aboard the space station, there is very little dialogue in Wall*E. Wall*E himself only has a vocabulary of three words, along with a range of beeps and robotic purrs (he is voiced by Ben Burtt, who also gave life to the iconic R2-D2 in Star Wars). Much of the interaction between him and Eve is pantomime that owes more to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton than E.T., although his design is clearly an homage to the great Steven Spielberg film, as well as bearing more than a passing resemblance to the 80s children's sci-fi movie Short Circuit. For Pixar Animation Studios, Wall*E was a brave film to make. A children's film with little dialogue, and a robot for a main character whose best friend is a cockroach? Why not just make Finding Nemo 2, I'm sure the stakeholders would have asked.
One day Wall*E's existence is interrupted by the arrival of a sleek spaceship that produces a sleek robot named Eve. Wall*E is initially perplexed by Eve, but eventually decides that he has a raging crush on her. His pursuit of Eve is rich with humour, romance, and a whole bunch of 'aw' moments. After a sequence of events too complicated to explain here (and too delightful for me to ruin the surprise for you), Wall*E finds himself aboard the spacecraft and eventually is taken to a space station containing the humans that had to leave Earth hundreds of years earlier because our efforts to poison it succeeded with flying colours.
The film has copped some flak for the portrayal of the humans in the space station. They are all large and bloated, do not have the ability to walk (they rely on what look like reclining segueways) and never tear their eyes away from computer screens that perpetually hover a few inches from their faces. The film, some argue, tells us that obesity breeds stupidity. I don't see it like that. What I think the film is saying is that our current society is obsessed with more, more, more. We all have our indulgences that have become the focus of our lives, even if we don't realise it -- be it food, material possessions, or the cyborgisation (I'm pretty sure I made that word up) of our lives through technological advances. What Wall*E argues, gently and sweetly and without pretension or pomposity, is that if we took a step back we would see that we really are living in the Garden of Eden.
Apart from the plot involving the humans aboard the space station, there is very little dialogue in Wall*E. Wall*E himself only has a vocabulary of three words, along with a range of beeps and robotic purrs (he is voiced by Ben Burtt, who also gave life to the iconic R2-D2 in Star Wars). Much of the interaction between him and Eve is pantomime that owes more to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton than E.T., although his design is clearly an homage to the great Steven Spielberg film, as well as bearing more than a passing resemblance to the 80s children's sci-fi movie Short Circuit. For Pixar Animation Studios, Wall*E was a brave film to make. A children's film with little dialogue, and a robot for a main character whose best friend is a cockroach? Why not just make Finding Nemo 2, I'm sure the stakeholders would have asked.
I've been making an unfortunate habit of quoting other critics in my reviews recently, but the way my friend Rollie Schott describes the film perfectly reflects my own feelings, if only I had found the words first: "I love the idea that as a race who conspires to supply ourselves with every available material convenience within the realms of scientific possibility, (humans) created a being whose highest aspiration is simply to hold someone's hand."
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