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November 20th, 2008
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Hello, WALL-E!

A humane cartoon that's more real than most live action
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 20th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
COURTESY PHOTO One's trash is another's treasure. WALL-E discovers a Rubik's Cube along with something more complex ? love.
WALL-E


Directed by Andrew Stanton
With Fred Willard and the voices of Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy
An approach to Earth while hearing Michael Crawford singing “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from the film version of Hello, Dolly! suggests we’re entering a lighthearted musical salute to Broadway’s golden era. However, as we get closer to the planet’s surface — and we do seem to be heading right for Broadway — we’re met with a dystopic panorama. New York lifelessly stretches under a dull, dun sky, where the Hudson River has evaporated away, leaving a Hudson Canyon. It’s a bleak junkscape, yet Crawford’s cheering voice continues to echo through it.
Earth is not completely dead. As organic representatives, the cockroaches have, as expected, survived. But something like life has also developed in a little trash compactor named WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class), who seems to have been assembled from a combination of Sony, Tonka and Westinghouse scraps topped with binoculars for eyes. There were once thousands of WALL-Es roaming the Earth, attempting to manage the mounds of unrecyclable rubbish that man had created that eventually helped kill off the planet. Of the little compactors working through New York, only one has managed to survive over the 700 years since the last humans evacuated the planet in a mass exodus aboard a huge spaceship called the Axiom.
In those intervening centuries, the last WALL-E became sentient. He developed a sophisticated emotional base that seems to have been achieved through multiple viewings of Hello, Dolly! (many young, isolated gay boys will immediately identify with the power of show tunes to help mold a panoply of emotions). As the wooden boy Pinocchio has his cricket sidekick, so this metal boy has developed a friendship with a cockroach. They tour the city looking for interesting rubbish, which WALL-E collects — strange artifacts like Christmas lights, Rubik’s Cubes and a few promotional tie-in products from ancient, forgotten Pixar features. For his insect chum, there’s always some indestructible Hostess cake to eat. As much as he’s aware of the state of things, WALL-E is happy, certainly content. Then he meets EVE.
After blasting through the leaden atmosphere and landing in Lower Manhattan, a strange spaceship deposits a small, sleekly modern robot onto the ground. This is EVE, an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. EVE and her kind are periodically dropped onto Earth in search of organic life, which, if found, signals to the Axiom that humans could safely return to the planet. WALL-E has never seen an EVE before, and he suddenly experiences a new sensation — love.
The charming courtship of these two pieces of equipment (a marvelous addition to cinematic New York love stories) is interrupted when EVE is given a scrawny little plant that WALL-E discovered growing underneath an abandoned refrigerator. EVE conceals the plant within her body’s cavity, and, fulfilling her task, signals to the mothership that organic life has been discovered. The ship arrives to transport EVE’s discovery back to the Axiom for further analysis. Desperate not to lose EVE, WALL-E hitches a ride onto the ship.
Pixar has rewritten the history of animation, but even by its standards WALL-E is unique. It’s certainly the most sophisticated narrative the animation studio has developed, while simultaneously being three-quarters free of dialogue. Indeed, beside robotic whirrs and beeps, the film is primarily visual pantomime, as rich as a great silent film.
One other real human (besides the cast of Hello, Dolly!) can be found in this world — the last president of the corporate-governmental world body Buy-n-Large, Shelby Forthwright (the hilarious Fred Willard), who’s seen in old footage before the Axiom’s departure. Aboard the Axiom, humankind has changed considerably in 700 years. Having every one of their needs met, a race of obese creatures has developed, moving about on hovering La-Z-Boys, as they cannot walk, and continually chatting on telescreens while sucking what passes for nourishment from Big Gulp containers.
One critic has pointed out that Pixar’s parent company, Disney, spent a lot of money to send up its archetypal Disneyworld audience. There seems to be some truth in that. Yet it again points to the willingness of WALL-E’s creators to tackle serious subjects, from environmental degradation to the loss of one’s humanity in an over-commercialized world. What does it say about us that a little trash compactor has more feeling for life than humans?
WALL-E’s animation is equally impressive, often reaching points where it’s difficult to know whether a scene is really animated and not reality itself. Which seems fitting, as this is one of the most humane films I’ve seen in ages, even though very few real humans appear on the screen. The welcome absence of comic chat and patter will allow this film to truly appeal to a global audience, who will not need the references that the two (soon to be three) Toy Story outings or Cars require. And the film can appeal simultaneously to older kids and adults, though younger children might be lost occasionally.
Opening WALL-E is a clever Pixar short titled Presto, a violent little Vaudeville sketch that’s far more Bugs than Mickey, and welcome for that. A good companion to prove Pixar’s versatility.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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