10:23pm Wednesday 7th January 2009
By Mark Foker
I’m sure that this DVD found its way into many Christmas sacks this festive season. WALL-E is another visually stunning story from the house of Pixar. Directed & written by Andrew Stanton who was also responsible for ‘Finding Nemo’. This is a very clever and heart warming film, full of humour, friendship, hope and even romance.
It just goes to show you that the storyline is everything. There is not a huge cast list of famous name voiceovers as with DreamWorks ‘Shark Tale’ (which was instantly forgettable) and there is hardly any dialogue for the first half of the film. However, WALL-E is so endearing that you get swept up in his world and he makes you care about him.
WALL-E is set 700 years in the future and planet earth has become one large dumping ground for refuge. All the inhabitants left the planet in an enormous Ark type spaceship waiting for earth to become habitable once more so they can return. WALL-E is a cute little robot whose job is to whiz around the planet clearing up the trash by gathering it up inside his little square body where it is condensed into small cubes which become building blocks. WALL-E stacks the blocks one by one until they resemble a weird skyscraper landscape, from the opening shots we are tricked into thinking that we are looking at some sprawling metropolis.
When one of his tractor treads becomes faulty and in need of repair, he stops by another WALL-E look alike robot that is dysfunctional and rusting away. It is here that we discover that WALL-E is the last of his kind conditioned to clear up the city for what may be eternity. His only companion is a cockroach which seems to be pretty indestructible as WALL-E accidentally runs him down on many occasions.
Although WALL-E is a robot he thinks independently and keeps himself amused by collecting anything that he finds interesting such as a Rubik’s cube, a velvet ring case (not the ring!) and a much prized VHS tape of the musical ‘Hello Dolly’ which he plays over and over again. Who would have thought you would ever hear a young Michael Crawford singing ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’ in a Sci-Fi movie? It’s through this musical that WALL-E escapes to another world, ironically the world he is already in.
WALL-E’s life changes when a surveillance spacecraft arrives on Earth and out pops a very sleek and shiny Japanese style robot (complete contrast to WALL-E’s beaten up and dirty looking body) who introduces herself as EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). It’s love at first sight for WALL-E but EVE takes a little bit longer to come around, in fact she has some awesome firepower in her trigger happy fingers!
EVE has a strict directive to adhere to and we discover that she has been sent from the Mother Ship carrying the passengers from Earth. When EVE heads back to the ship WALL-E follows in hot pursuit like a love sick teenager. It’s the second half of the film on the Mother Ship where we hear from the humans who have been so spoilt and pampered over centuries of floating in space that they all appear to have evolved as obese and lazy slobs. You remember I said this film is not full of famous names etc? There are a couple, we are treated to the ever faithful voice of John Ratzenberger (Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Ratatouille, Cars,) as one of the human characters and Sigourney Weaver is the voice of the nasty on-board ships computer, a homage no doubt to ‘Alien’ but that’s pretty much it on the celebrity front.
I know this sounds corny…but this really is a film for all the family even the cat will love it. Now I couldn’t sign off without mentioning the similarity between little WALL-E and JOHNNY 5 from the 1986 Short Circuit. Those people of a certain age will remember “Johnny 5 alive!” There was even a website dedicated to this subject. However, Director Andrew Stanton denies that JOHNNY 5 was the inspiration and said that the design of WALL-E is a cross between the Pixar Luxo lamp in the Pixar logo and a pair of binoculars that he saw being used at a baseball game. Both great characters in their time but I think WALL-E just has the edge in the cute stakes.
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