WALL-E

Currently ranked at number 19 in the Internet Movie Database list of the top 250 films ever made, WALL-E arrives on our shores riding a wave of rave reviews and box office success. No mean accomplishment for a movie about a trash compactor. WALL-E can’t even talk, though he does manage an ingratiating burble and squeak.

The latest from Pixar has been in development for a long time, as far back as the first Toy Story (which writer-director Andrew Stanton has a script credit on). Even for this bold studio, it can’t have been an easy sell: a dystopian sci-fi movie set on an abandoned earth, and a love story between two inanimate objects, with virtually no dialogue for the first half hour? I don’t know how you would go about pitching a movie like this, but if Stanton was honest, he’d have had to say it’s something like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 meets Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

Now that’s a strange combination. Kubrick is the rigorous logician, a cold, misanthropic rationalist (or at least, that’s often how people see him). Chaplin, on the other hand, came from Victorian melodrama, he was a brilliant filmmaker, and an agonizing perfectionist like Kubrick, but he was also shamelessly sentimental. But somehow this mixture of hot and cold, sweet and sour works a treat. WALL-E is a masterpiece, certainly one of Pixar’s greatest achievements, and one of the best movies you will see from anywhere this year.

Fast-forward 700 years. The world is a toxic dustbowl, and mankind has flown the coop. A rusty box sitting on caterpillar tracks, with a retractable binocular-shaped head, WALL-E is the last robot. He compresses junk into building blocks then piles them up into towers, shadow-skyscrapers of waste in the ruins of an unidentified city.

WALL-E, we gather, has developed more than a trace of consciousness. He’s a hoarder, curious enough to collect unusual bric-a-brac: a whisk; an electric light bulb; bubble wrap. He’s also terribly alone (an undemonstative pet cockroach excepted).

His most treasured item is a VHS of “Hello, Dolly” – he particularly warms to a scene with Michael Crawford taking Marianne McAndrew by the hand, input that leaves his systems scrambling when he bumps into Eve, a gleaming research pod sent down by our descendents on the mother ship. She (and she is a she) is WALLE’s first visitor of the millennium. Eve’s sleek, egg-like design and distinctive start-up chime must be a wink to Pixar boss Steve Jobs. At any rate, she is the apple of WALL-E’s eye. He’s so smitten he’d follow her anywhere – even out there, into space. Smarter than he is, and far more developed, she doesn’t exactly reciprocate. In fact there’s a real possibility she’s going to blow him into smithereens. That’s love, I guess.

Robots have often been humanized in sci-fi movies – in Blade Runner, AI, and Metropolis, for example. Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running with its eco-message and boxy robots Huey, Dewey and Louie is another obvious touchstone. Nor is WALL-E alone in implying that human beings are becoming more mechanistic ourselves, but the obese overgrown-babies Stanton imagines in the film’s second half, reclining in hover chairs, pampered and cocooned from birth is a particularly scathing caricature of consumer over-dependency.

This second half is more conventional than the first, less delicate and inevitably more broad-brush. Even so, you can still distinguish the influence of slapstick masters like Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton (apparently Stanton and co immersed themselves in silent comedy for a year and a half).

WALL-E may not be a perfect movie. Some business involving a team of rogue robots is unduly scrappy and it can’t quite see through the tragic implications that seem to be called for – but it’s filled with grace and beauty.

The animation is superb. The rendering of the smoggy abandoned planet; gleaming futuristic technology; the nebulous beauty of the Milky Way are, what’s the phrase? Out of this world.

A pas-de-deux in zero gravity (Wall-E using a fire extinguisher for propulsion); Eve’s immediate effect on a previously dim lightbulb; her maternal glow as she carries out her primary directive; or the fleeting moment when first-time space traveler Wall-E turns back and sees the Earth, and tries to share his joy in the discovery… These are rare and precious treasures.

You definitely don’t need a child to see this picture, but do go with someone you love – and hold hands in the dark.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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