Filed under: Movie Reviews
For a film that requires little dialogue and covers a topic that should scare mankind, Pixar has created another lovable, funny and thoughtful animation, Wall-e.
Wall-e and Eve watch the sunset.
Director Andrew Stanton has created a fluid animation to suit all age groups, which has an eye opening message about friendship, love and our fragile Earth.
Wall-e is set over 700 years into the future, when the world is void of human, plant or animal life, overrun by garbage and waste. It tells a bleak tale of the hundreds of years of environmental damage done by humans, their greed and consumerism.
Surviving humans have driven themselves off their native planet and are living on a holiday ship, the Axiom. Now obese and confined to hover chairs permanently, these super-sized humans lives are now controlled by computers. The ships useless caption (Jeff Garlin) even knows nothing about his home planet, in a scene where he uses the principles of Google to look up ‘Farm.’
Back on Earth, a small dented robot named Wall-e (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class), voice by Ben Burtt, zips about compacting the waste that has been left. Wall-e and his best friend, a cockroach that he has trained, roam the desolate city collecting Zippo lighters, spare parts and even a green plant that he places in a shoe.
Wall-e spends his nights alone, protected from the dust storms in his home, the back of a truck with his possessions watching “Hello Dolly.” This isn’t the only not-so-sneaky movie reference during Wall-e. Throughout the 95 minute feature film, Sigourney Weaver makes a voice cameo and hilariously there are several references to “2001 – A Space Odyssey” and “Wallace and Gromit.”
The little robots life changes when Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), voice by Elissa Knight, lands on Earth sent from the Axiom. Eve is brand new, sleek and silent robot with a capacity to kill. Her directive is to seek out plant life on Earth. Wall-e finds her beautiful and they soon meet in a oddly cute display of beeps and broken English.
Wall-e unwittingly shows the now playful Eve the plant he had found earlier, she grabs it and falls silent. Her directive is now complete. Wall-e follows Eve back to the Axiom and directly to possibly danger, hundreds of light years away in a display of love and loyalty.
Through animation, Wall-e takes the doom and gloom out of real world topics that the audience is faced with daily. Wall-e doesn’t need death, violence or other Hollywood devices to shine the light on obesity, climate change and gross over-consumerism. It simply uses a friendship to intelligently and humorously prove its point.
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