Pixar has won me over again! June 27, 2008
Pixar has one hell of a group of story writers because they’ve done it again with Wall-E. Came back from watching the first midnight showing of Wall-E and I have to say I absolutely love this movie. Not only did Pixar remake Johnny 5 of the Short Circuit movies into their own little CGI character, but they add better humor and a lovable nature to Wall-E that blow Johnny 5 out of the water…plus he’s the coolest looking little robot ever. Makes me want to buy the Wall-E toys.
What makes Wall-E such a good movie is it’s lack of using voice actors and yet Wall-E and the other robots (with their limited use of voices and words) convey such emotions to the screen that you don’t necessarily need to talk in the movie. There’s some voice work by the humans in the film, but the majority of the time it’s Wall-E, EVE and the other bots. It’s funny to think how robots have such outstanding emotions for…well…robots. With Wall-E, you can tell when he’s said, when he’s happy, when he’s scared without seeing any sort of facial expressions besides the movement of his camera eyes which is pretty much the only emotional thing on his face. Even with no real face to show expressions, he carries it out like it’s nothing, simple as that. Visually, Wall-E is simply stunning and superb.
Pixar’s usually know for its family friendly kids movies and yeah, Wall-E has all that in it, all the G-rated awesomeness that kids love and parents enjoy also, but Pixar spreads this universal coolness for all ages. Although it was midnight and kids don’t usually go to watch movies at that time, the theater me and some friends watched the film at was filled with mainly college folks, pretty packed, almost a full theater. I would expect more folks on opening day. Anyway, that tells you something. That Pixar not only made Wall-E for kids, but for everyone.
Pixar has a way of fulfilling the child in me by giving me wholesome entertainment without me getting bored or thinking it’s stupid. Coming from a long line of awesome movies, Wall-E is probably going to be ranked as my all time favorite Pixar movie knocking out my now past favorite, the Incredibles, to second place and Toy Story 1 to third.
I should explain what exactly Wall-E is about for those of you living under a rock. So basically…Earth is turning into a shit-hole because we humans pretty much polluted the Earth to no ends, so in a desperate measure giant cruise-like ships containing probably thousands or millions of people get sent into space for re-population and survival while the humans that are still on Earth stay behind to try and clean it up.
In the process little robots called Wall-E’s are made to help with garbage control, but the world ends up with so much garbage and pollution that the people and the poor little Wall-E’s could not even fix it and eventually everything on Earth dies out even the robot cleaners…except one Wall-E. He’s kept alive to forever clean up the Earths garbage. That’s the basic plot of the story, it gets a bit more complicated later on with him meeting EVE, a robot who scouts Earth for sustainable lifeforms and even later on when Wall-E goes on-board the spaceship, Axiom, in which the humans are living in although everything they do is controlled robotically making them obese couch potatoes.
The movie itself is filled with a lot of important messages mainly about how people need to stop turning the Earth into a hellhole. You push Mother Earth too far and it’ll bite back. The same message was said in the movie, The Happening, which played out a bit more differently, but ended up with humans dying. We destroy Earth and eventually she’ll destroy us. You really can’t expect the world to sustain suitable life if we take it for granted and pollute it and bring the toxicity level to a high.
Slight spoiler alert, stay clear if you want to watch Wall-E. The movie also makes light of how human beings rely too much on robots to do everything for them. In the movie the remaining human race living aboard the Axiom are obese, lazy, tired people who don’t even walk because they use hoverchairs that movie for them; food is mushed together into a milkshake looking drink, people talk to each by communicating on a screen rather then in person. Robots are doing everything for them, feeding them, grooming them, driving them around, telling them what to do basically, robots even play virtual golf for them and when you think about it, it kind of is true. There’s a lot of things robots do for us that we take for granted and instead of doing it for ourselves we conserve our energy by giving that job to a robot. In later scenes in the film, you find out that the whacked out, malfunctioning robots aren’t exactly the bad crazy ones, but the efficient, working ones become the real bad bots. It’s a scary thought, kind of like the Matrix but instead, not as creepy.
I guess the main idea of the story is it’s love theme between Wall-E and EVE. It’s cute and a nice little plot for them. It’s pretty adorable seeing them together and their interactions. I guess when you’re alone on Earth for hundreds of years creating emotions and feelings for yourself, you tend to crave it and Wall-E deserved it. He got what he wanted, a companion and the love that he was wanting.
This post is way too long, I’ll end it here. But to say Wall-E was a good movie is underwhelming, it’s a pretty awesome movie is more like it. I highly recommend for any of you folks to watch it and after reading my garbled, shit writing, I think you better go see it for yourself.
