Global Warming: Review for “WALL-E”

Posted on July 7, 2008 Updated on August 22, 2008

WALL-E is the newest film from the PIXAR family film collection, one of the most successful companies in family films in the world. They brought toys alive in Toy Story, made super heroes human in The Incredibles, and made a rat’s dream a reality in last year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar winner, Ratatouile. With each film, brought newer technology and more realistic stories and visuals. If you can empathize with a real rat, but then realise that that rat is actually animated, whoever created him is a genius. Andrew Stanton, who brought us 2003’s Finding Nemo, directs this tale of a little robot whose duty is to lean up messes. WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. To me, creating words like that that actually make sense from one word that sounds cute is great. According to the story, there used to be hundreds of WALL-Es roaming around, picking up trash. But when humans left the Earth and became at couch potatoes who do nothing but sit on their butts in a moving recliner, the status of our planet became much worse. But when WALL-E, a very curious fellow, a character trait that none of the other WALL-Es had, is just about to lose all hope, a spaceship lands. A newer and sleeker robot comes out of the spaceship and WALL-E falls in love. He falls in love with EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), who has one thing on her mind: to find any plant life on the now desolate Earth. He is kind of a personifitcation of little nerds everywhere who fall in love with really beautiful popular girls that the nerd knows he’ll never be able date. But the beautiful thing about WALL-E is its personification, spot on reactions, and awesome beeps. For instance, when EVE accidentally almost ruins WALL-E’s tape of Hello Dolly!, he quickly fixes it, but just to make sure, he pops it in the player and you see him and his emotion in his eyes, almost saying “Please work! Please work! Ohhhh, please work!”. That is another thing, the emotion that the Pixar crew put into a robot’s eyes is amazing. He looks so adorable. Ben Burtt who created the sounds for the Star Wars series, brings to life the sounds of space. You can kind of hear a little R2-D2 in WALL-E’s voice.  The soundtrack, composed by Thomas Newman, is great, a mix of techno-ish sounds with classical music, including the song “La Vie en Rose” during a montage of WALL-E’s determination to try to get EVE to like him.Throughout the film are two numbers from the film version of Hell Dolly! (that starred Barbara Streisand) that play over and over again in the film. When showing the emotion between the two main characters, “It Only Takes a Moment” is very sweet. The second time is still sweet, watching WALL-E curl his hands together. But once you hit the fifth time, it’s really annoying. Same with “Put On Your Sunday Clothes”. The first time is cute, watching WALL-E get to work or dance with a little hat. But once you hit the sixth time hearing it, it becomes outrageous. But the film becomes over politically driven, screaming out “Save our Earth!”. Other than those two things, this is a great family film. Quiet and sweet.  

Grade: A-