Wall-E
OK, I'll own this right now and admit I'm probably (definitely) going too far on this one. Wall-E is, after all, a family film first and a sci-fi film second.But I feel compelled to include it in my list of favourites because I think that science-fiction has a place at the juvenile level as well. Growing up, I read a lot of YA science fiction, like Alfred Slote or K.A. Applegate. There's a great deal of imagination put into YA sci-fi, and a lot of it flows more freely because there's no preconceptions about content going in.
The same can be said of Pixar Animation films. The pieces this studio puts out are some of the only films I consistently look forward to seeing. With Wall-E, the wonderful people at Pixar took their tried and true formula of short films sans dialogue and stretched it out to the feature-length mark.
The plot is actually quite adult: the world of the far future has become an environmental catastrophe. Fleeing the problem, humanity takes to the stars in huge starships, leaving behind numerous robots to clean the Earth up in their absence. Wall-E is one of those robots, and possibly the only one left.
The entire first act of this movie is told without dialogue. There's a brief, framework monologue in the form of a cheery, satirical advertisement on a billboard, but after that there is a full 22 minutes where not a word is spoken (not counting all the various bleeps and beeps).
These filmmakers do more to establish character and relationship in that short time than some films do in their entire scripts, and they do it with considerable panache and skill. The people at Pixar know that just as much can be said with a single gesture as with several lines of dialogue. After all, when face-to-face we communicate with facial expressions, body language and intonation just as much (if not more) as we communicate with words.
Okay, so that's pretty much a Pixar trademark. Why, then, is the sci-fi setting important?
Well, the reason I think this movie was so effective as a science fiction pastiche is that it not only explores themes of environmentalism in a society currently gripped by eco-anxiety, but it also puts forth the idea that artificial intelligences can develop personalities.
I'm not even kidding. While the "green message" may come to the fore in the second act, Wall-E is much more a little romance, a look at love in the last place we'd expect to find it: between robots. What makes that study strong is that the action never strays far from the relationship between little Wall-E and EVE. Their is intrigue on the starship Axiom, some light "save the trees" fare, but it's all background noise. We're here to watch a cute little robot fall in love with another cute little robot.
If that sounds like hokum unworthy of consideration amongst sci-fi canon, the reason I think it's so fun and great to watch is that there's little of the usual cheap jokes here. With a lot of animation of late, the temptation is to show "x" as people. Cars as people, Monsters as people. etc. What set this film apart from other Pixar outings was that these characters are ROBOTS, through and through. They don't attempt to emulate human behaviour; they've learned their own. They don't make a world up after ours; they have their own.
When Wall-E and EVE arrive on the Axiom, one of the human ships, there is a very clear separation of the robot world and the human one. The robots zip around on light rails at lightning fast speeds with perfect precision. They have their own repair ward, run and managed by other robots. No humans enter these areas, and they don't need to. The robots are completely self-sufficient.
This is what makes this film unique for me. There's no winking at the camera, no over-the-top puns. Even though we project human traits onto Wall-E's foibles, they're foibles he's developed on his own. When he disrupts the daily routine of the other robots, we can see how those foibles rub off. He waves to the administrator robot. Later on, it waves back. He tracks dirt all over the ship, forcing Mo the cleaner to disobey his routine. They're still ROBOTS, but they're adapting to changing stimuli.
I don't think it would've worked with any other medium. In point of fact, it hasn't. Finding Nemo had fish, Toy Story had toys, Cars had...well...cars. All of these movies are great, but none of them have the same kind of emotional weight for me that Wall-E does.
There's a strange kind of maturity to be found in this movie, and I'm not just talking about the love story. The imagery on Earth is bleak, the message is urgent, and the characters, especially the captain react with believable gravitas when they see the results of their "cleanup":
It's amazingly grim, and although the moral is a little on the nose, it's no less potent. We have a responsibility to this planet, and it's up to this generation and those that follow it to set the trend. That's heavy stuff for a kid's movie.
Family films that treat children like adults are always the best. Kids are always in a hurry to grow up. Adults are always trying to retrieve their youth. Wall-E manages to cater to both.
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This movie is amazing!
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