movies: wall-e

My favourite Pixar movie of all time would have to be Finding Nemo... it makes me cry, it makes me laugh, I love it... and it beats pretty much all the other Pixar movies by a fair distance (with the possible exception of Ratatouille which slides into a slightly closer second place).

However, Wall-E, is now equal first with Nemo... maybe even edging ahead...

And unsurprisingly they're both written and directed by "Sooooperdirector" Andrew Stanton...

I loved this movie SOOOOOO much!

Before I launch into the whys and wherefores of Wall-E, I will say that the "silent" short that preceded it, Presto, is possibly their best ever... it certainly had Ma howling with laughter, and it was a little bit Bugs Bunny, but much, much cuter.

But once Wall-E started, I was just completely and totally absorbed... from the opening song against a starfield, to the reveal of the title character, the movie had me by the frontal lobe all the way through to the end credit sequence that starts out with an epilogue done in various artistic styles through time before settling into some nice 80's pixelart when the credit crawl starts.

With a few of the Pixar movies (Cars, I'm looking at you now) I've been able to work out what's going to happen (more or less) by the end of the movie within the first ten or fifteen minutes. Not this time... we were at about the two thirds or three quarter mark and I remember thinking "I have NO idea how this is going to end"... I mean even with Finding Nemo, you were pretty confident that they were going to, you know, FIND Nemo by the end of it... this, colour me clueless. Which I totally love in a movie!

In a lot of ways it's a very experimental and "out there" movie, especially from the perspective of a mainstream Hollywood animation studio... with the exception of some "commercials" and the simplistic speech of the two main characters there actually isn't any "human" dialogue for the first 40 minutes, and even after that there are only a handful of speaking roles... the cast list is about ten people (and one of them isn't even a person, it's the MacInTalk text to speech program), so in a lot of ways, especially until we first meet the humans, it feels like some sort of silent movie.

And it's also the first Pixar feature length movie to ever feature live action footage. Which did throw me a little bit in some ways... I'm honestly not sure why they didn't do that footage with computer animation, especially since it has real people in it, and then you end up comparing that against the rather unique looking humans later in the movie, but it also makes the early part of the movie feel very real, Pixar's usual attention to magnificent detail notwithstanding.

I can also see why people have been talking about the movie having this big grand "environmental" message to it. But, honestly, it's not something that clubs you over the head... you can choose to really read a pro-environment stance into it, or you can just let it go and enjoy the movie at face value.

But there are any number of other themes that you can tease out... the dehumanising and unhealthy effect of technology, how random acts of kindness can spread, that thinking for yourself is better than mindlessly following orders... all that good stuff... the environmental stuff is just one part.

In many ways, the titular robot reminded me of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit... but, you know, in a "doesn't actually suck" kind of way (okay, I'll admit, Short Circuit was one of my favourite movies when I was 12)... I think it's the all terrain treads, the eyes and that sense of sweet innocence to be honest.

But my favourite character has to be M-O (Microbe Obliterator)... he never says anything beyond "MO" and "Foreign contaminant!" but there's something adorable about him.

And now, for only the second time ever, I'm going to score Wall-E a perfect five.... I loved it THAT much...

yani's rating: 5 Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class robots out of 5