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Is this robot in the best movie of the decade?
Review: Wall-E (4 stars)
We've come to expect brilliance from the digital wizards at Pixar, but WALL-E is pure genius.
A film that rediscovers the very heart of visual storytelling by stripping the soundtrack of verbal dialogue while redefining the once jagged boundaries of polygon-based animation, WALL-E is a seamless fusion of analogue sensibility and digital precision - and that's just on the technical side.
Beyond the evocative and frequently jaw-dropping stream of computer-generated cels, lies a story and an entire narrative design that follows a very similar old-meets-new motif.
Beginning with Presto, a silent digital short that hearkens back to the golden days of Chuck Jones, the Pixar team prepares the ground for what's to come by reminding us we don't actually need language to tell us what's happening. As long as the images can seduce the retinal nerve and communicate a sense of internal drama, our analytic linguistic centre doesn't even realize it's out of the action.
The result is open access to our gooey emotional core - the only place that can really give birth to a kid's classic, and the only force with enough transformative power to let us fall in love with a robot - from the very first frame.
When we first meet WALL-E, he's roaming around in what appears to be a familiar landscape - with a few eerie differences. Instead of people filling city streets, there is trash - mountains and mountains of consumer garbage.
Assigned to compact the ambient litter into tidy little cubes, and then stack them into skyscraping pyramids, one little Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth Class) has managed to continue functioning on an abandoned planet.
Not even the other WALL-Es have managed to survive the frequent dust storms and thunder showers, but over the past 700 years, one little task-oriented chunk of wires and programming has been able to adapt to the hostile climate, and to scavenge spare parts to stay alive.
As we follow WALL-E around the deserted streets laden with advertising for the all-powerful Buy-N-Large corporation, we're given a brief explanation of what happened.
Earthlings created too much stuff. We literally trashed the planet and killed off the environment that sustains us. The Buy-N-Large corporation offers what it believes to be the ideal solution: escape to space in large ships until the robots clean up the mess back home.
Seven hundred years later, the planet is still vacant of human life. The only thing WALL-E has for company is a lone cockroach and a videotape of Hello, Dolly! that he watches every night when he comes back to his container, takes off his treads and settles down for a night of low-voltage fun.
Though he's repeated the same task for centuries, WALL-E has clearly acquired a profound knowledge of humanity by sifting through and compressing all the crap we've thrown away - and all the material goods that may have once held meaning to a human being.
From jewellery boxes to plastic toys, WALL-E has amassed his own collection of precious stuff, making him feel entirely human, but all the more alone.
This film succeeds without words. Thanks to some smart nods to science-fiction classics such as A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Runner, some revolutionary animation techniques and new software that brings an unprecedented level of cinematographic finesse to each frame to create images with depth, sentiment, tension and cultural meaning.
An automatic classic that will stand the test of time and sear itself into the collective memory of a generation, WALL-E is so profoundly moving, so quietly eloquent and so purely magical, it may well be movie of the decade.
The trailer was interesting. Reminds me of Johnny5, but cuter.
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