Film Review: WALL-E

By Gail Campbell-Thomson

WALL-E (Cert U, 103 mins)
Starring the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Fred Willard
Written by Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter
Directed by Andrew Stanton

PIXAR Animation Studios have a reputation for making entertainment into an artform, and with WALL-E the team responsible for making a rat nicer than Gordon Ramsey (Ratatouille), fish look cuddly (Finding Nemo) and a family of superheroes look, well, super (The Incredibles) have scored another very definite hit.

WALL-E is set in a future where humanity has abandoned planet Earth to a choking mountain of toxic rubbish in favour of a life of slothful ease among the stars, courtesy of an army of service robots programmed to cater to their every need.

In fact, humanity has totally given up stewardship of the planet and delegated the hard work of cleaning up the mess to an army of trash-compacting cleaning robots known as Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class (or WALL-E). But after hundreds of years, the mess has overwhelmed almost everything; except for one little robot.

Stuck in his very own version of the rat race, (which most adult audience members will sympathise with), WALL-E gets up, works all day and then goes home exhausted. In-between he finds time to scavenge for riches in the garbage, and lovingly decorates his home with a generation of pop culture treasures: Video tapes, Frisbees, Rubix cubes and fairy lights all lovingly preserved.

Because, after all these years, the little robot has an unusual glitch. He's developed a personality. And he's lonely.

His only companion is a seemingly indestructible cockroach with amazingly canine qualities, but his craving for the human emotion he sees in an old video of the musical Hello Dolly! is about to become interrupted by off world visitors who leave another robot, EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), on a scouting mission of her own.

One look and, bang, our hero is in love at first sight.

And the eyes most definitely have it. One of the most astonishing feats here is the fact that there is little or no traditional dialogue for over half of the film. A fact that is almost completely unnoticeable to the audience thanks to a clever soundtrack which mixes sound designer Ben Burtt's brilliantly expressive robot 'language', everyday bumps, bangs and crashes along with occasional snippets from the vintage musical recording that WALL-E loves and a beautifully whimsical score by Thomas Newman. Once again, Pixar have managed to make seemingly inanimate characters seem more human than human utilising wonderfully expressive eye movements, non-verbal communication and a ton of genuine heart. The film has a seemingly effortless ability to tap into an emotional empathy with the audience which quite often brings a lump to the throat.

The character of WALL-E is an endearing mixture of tenacious childlike wonder and innocent curiosity (think R2-D2 meets E.T.), while the more high-tech EVE is all flying sleek lines and an amusing combination of giggly charm and hair-trigger destructiveness.

The visual design of WALL-E is simply staggering. The screen is filled with quirky characters against one fantastic three-dimensional vista after another. From the deserted ruins of WALL-E's eerily lonely metropolis, the breath-taking views of the cosmos as he hitches a ride thorough space, to the hi-tech gaudy grander of the Axiom, humanity's orbiting space ship.

The film works in some very salient warnings to the X-Box generation about the dangers inactivity and a strong yet subtle environmental wake-up call over the current state of the planet, brought home by the isolated, bloated mess the humans aboard the Axiom have become.

Some nice little Sci-Fi homages aimed at the adults in the audience will raise a smile, and include several amusing references to Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' as well as the casting of Sigourney (Ellen Ripley from the 'Alien' saga) Weaver as the voice of the ship's computer.

This is a sweetly bold, beautiful, whimsically funny fantasy that both adults and children can and will enjoy.

As with most Pixar presentations, the film is preceded by an animated short. In this case, the sublimely comic 'Presto', a brilliant Laurel and Hardy-esque slapstick rollercoaster ride starring a stage magician and his bolshy bunny partner in dispute over a carrot.