Recommended: WALL-E

Do you remember that Disney CG film Dinosaurs? It’s original concept involved a feature length movie with animals that only emoted, and never spoke. Having always been a big fan of computer animation, I was excited at the early rumors of the film. Unfortunately, Disney execs got involved and the result was the talky-travesty that we eventually saw. Okay, so maybe “travesty” is a strong word. It wasn’t a bad film– It just failed to live up to it’s potential as a work that stretched the boundaries of its format.

WALL-E succeeds in many, many ways, but the most fascinating aspect for me was the extent to which Pixar relied on nonverbal communication to convey the story. I have a strong feeling that in preparation for this film, the animators watched reels and reels of silent comedy films; Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin especially. Watch the movements of WALL-E, and I think you will see some of the exaggerated mannerisms of those silent film stars. Wall-E is all angles, but angles that can change their composition to one another, so he meets the basic principles of computer character animaton established by John Lasseter so many years ago with Luxo. He can squash and stretch.

(This review contains spoilers.)

The PIxar animators are so good at this with WALL-E that it’s almost easy to forget that he’s made of metal until the film reminds you so violently in places. And contrasted with Wall-E’s square, ridgid shape is Eve’s levitating upside-down egg form. It’s a simple way to distinguish feminine from the ridgid, angular male –but her character is not so simple. The first time she blasts the hell out of the deserted Earth, you realize that they’re playing with that notion as well. EVE is bad ass.

I would have loved to watch this movie with a handful of children and tried to pinpoint exactly the moment they fall in love with WALL-E and Eve. For an emotive garbage compactor on wheels, beaten up and over 700 years old, it is it’s almost surprising that he elicits the audience’s empathy so readily. His appearance is not traditionally cute (although the large eyes in the design definitely fit the cuteness visual pattern). Pixar spends precious minutes of screen time early on establishing WALL-E’s character. We see a robot who has deviated from his program, who has developed a personality and a soul.

These are the kinds of moments you will never see in a Dreamworks picture. Dreamworks doesn’t understand that it’s not your rendering engine or the voice actors that make your animated feature. Pixar punches an especially big hole in the voice actor myth by having two protagonists barely voiced at all. Dreamworks wants a laugh, but it doesn’t understand that to get a laugh, you have to make the audience care.

So many reviews I have read have focused on the message over the substance of the story. It’s easy to do that at this point because everyone expects a Pixar film to be far above most other movies in the story category. Ratatouille, while being perhaps one fo the weakest in the story department, owing to the extreme revisions the project went through once Brad Bird was brought onto the project, it was still better in story than most anything else released that year.

And yes, the message here by Pixar, particularly when it comes to the human race, is a disturbing one (in a good way_. The film’s director insists that they didn’t set out to portray the future human race as fat blobs who can’t get out of the hover-recliners and spend every minute of their lives consuming something. And I suspect this vision really did grow organically from the simple seed of a concept: the last robot on Earth.

And that’s how a great message is born. It is not forced. It never feels forced here, and it’s always up to you to draw the conclusion yourself. There is no preachy “if everyone is special, then nobody is special” line like in The Incredibles that explicitly states the theme. Those kinds of statements are the tell of a writer who lacks confidence in his audience. They are not to be found in WALL-E.

It is this message and the handling of it that makes WALL-E Pixar’s most amazing film yet. Consider that this is a G rated movie, and think about how it portrays Earth as a barren, garbage-covered rock. The opening is the bleakest in a children’s film I have ever seen. Everywhere, we see the signs of crass commercialism. The BuyNLarge logo becomes the spectre of doom. We recognize its meaning immediately, as we drink from our CocaCola sodas and contemplate our next shopping spree at Walmart. Even the ending feels ambiguous, if you leave out the credits sequence. Will humans succeed in recolonizing the Earth? Their first tentative steps on solid ground do not convey confidence.

Finally, I want to comment on the absolute brilliance of that final scene where for a few moments, Eve believes that WALL-E has lost his unique spark once she has repaired him. It mirrors the opening sequence so beautifully and perfectly that I wanted to shout in joy when I realized what they were doing. When WALL-E stares blankly at EVE and then begins to compact his most precious belongings, finally running over his friend the cockroach without a care, the audience in my theatre grew more silent that I can remember an audience being in years. The tension was so perfect and tight that I could have plucked it like a string. “Did she replace the part that made WALL-E who he is?” everyone wondered. And given the film before, I was not entirely convinced that they would bring him back.

Of course they did, and it’s easy to see that they would on the outside of the story. But it’s a mark of fantastic storytelling that from within the story, you believe that the inevitable might not happen, and that Pixar might just give us the most downbeat ending to a children’s film since Old Yellar. It would have been a Flowers for Algernon moment, almost. It is tempting to think that I would have preferred such an ending, but–No. I don’t think I would have. I came to love WALL-E too much over the running time. A happy ending for him was only appropriate after his hero’s journey. I cannot even speculate how Pixar could have made this film better. It’s perfection is neigh-ironclad for me.

Not only is this the best Pixar film yet, it is easily the best science fiction film of the decade. What was the last film you saw that examined things like the meaning of conciousness and the fate of future humanity? That didn’t feature 2.4 explosions per minute and a vapid and attractive femme fatale that only serves to embarass half the population (and more. See Wanted for an example of that). That Pixar has made the best science fiction film in recent memory should come as no surprise to me, but it does. Sometimes you lose track of what it is that makes science fiction great, and why it has inspired the fascination of millions since the first H.G. Wells stories. It takes a simple, pure experience like WALL-E to remind you just what that thing is. I can’t put words to it, but I can point to the screen and say, “There. There it is. That’s it.”

We need to write more like that.