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Disney/Pixar’s latest animation movie "WALL-E" is an engaging,
rich, family film with a serious message that isn’t crammed down our
throats. The message has to do with human activity’s causing climate
change and rendering the Earth so toxic it is uninhabitable for animal
or vegetable life—oh, with the exception of one cockroach (cockroaches
can survive anything, so I hear.)
It is also a robot love story. The film opens with the camera panning
over a wasteland of crumbling buildings in American cities and
desiccated landscapes. Everything is depicted in shades of brown and
rust, including the sky; a hazy miasma covers the Earth.
WALL-E (voice: Ben Burtt) is a small, robot, trash
collector/compactor/disposal unit that runs on treads. It is programmed
to clean and make orderly what humans have abandoned when they rocketed
off Earth into space.
The largely white, fat, and happy, Americans now live in the captained
space-ship colony, AXIOM (billing itself as the "Final
Funteer"). The rendering of AXIOM inhabitants is unflattering.
They all look like six-month-old babies in their one-piece red rompers,
except for the fat Captain (voice: Jeff Garlin), who wears regulation
captain garb.
Everyone (even the Captain) reclines on motorized Barca Loungers fitted
with plasma screens, like waiting-rooms at airports, their every
gustatory need voice-commanded and delivered by the ship’s robot
(voice: Signory Weaver).
WALL-E looks like a beat-up, urban Dumpster. Still, he is a cute little
guy with periscope eyes. He is very discerning. He has saved an old TV
and a Barbra Streisand "Hello Dolly" video, which he watches
throughout the initial scenes.
At its start, close to a half-hour of the film is without dialogue or
narrative—only a myriad of electronic beeps and whistles as WALL-E goes
about his business, sometimes accompanied by his chirruping cockroach
friend. WALL-E’s life is changed by the arrival of a smooth, white,
ovoid-shaped, blue-eyed EVE (voice: Elissa Knight), who someone said
looks like an Apple invention. EVE has arrived on a space ship sent to
Earth from AXIOM on a mission to bring back proof that toxic Earth is
once again inhabitable.
After some shoot-first moments on EVE’s part, EVE and WALL-E’s meeting
is aw-shucks cute, played out to Louis Armstrong’s "La Vie en
Rose," no less. Mission accomplished, she shuts down; the space
ship returns to collect her, and WALL-E hitches a ride.
The Pixar animators have outdone themselves with their depiction of
EVE’s world. There is an evolved WALL-E—a small sophisticated white,
vacuum cleaner that slides around on the smooth, marked floors,
flashing a warning of "Foreign Contaminants" as it sucks up
minuscule stuff. When WALL-E finds his way inside the colony, he’s
confused to find countless cloned Eves.
A later scene of EVE and WALL-E zooming around in outer space, to
"2001’s" "Blue Danube Waltz" is not only lyrically
beautiful, but contains some of the best visuals in the film. The film
pays tribute to "2001," not only with Richard Strauss‘s
"The Blue Danube," but also the "2001" opening
theme, "Also Spake Zarathustra."
Upon the discovery that Earth is once more habitable, the Captain sets
a course to return, only to be thwarted for a time by "Auto,"
an evil "2001" Hal-like computer program.
The film ends with EVE ministering to WALL-E who'd been seriously
damaged during the landing. Missing from the film, however, is a scene
showing the reactions of the roly-poly men, women, and look-alike
children, who tumble from the space ship on to a desiccated, deserted
earth. While the credits run, we see that they did okay. But how they
accomplished this could be another film. A sequel perhaps?
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