‘Wall-E’: Pixar’s Spirit in the Sky
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Pixar’s new movie, “Wall-E,” is the feel-good dystopian romance of the summer. Disney may have built its empire on a mouse, but it was Pixar that last year made an adorable, credible character out of a rat, and the animation studio’s follow-up is a lovelorn trash-compacting robot. The setting is certainly not Paris, but rather somewhere on an Earth, circa 2700, that’s covered in junk, abandoned by mankind, and bathed in sunrays this side of jaundiced.
Of course, the difference between Wall-E and any other counterintuitive hero (say, a kung fu panda) is Pixar’s capacity for fully imagined, painstakingly rendered worlds and a genuine feel for emotional gradations — not gimmicks. The first half-hour of “Wall-E” is effectively the best summer movie all by itself, and its charm and sense of transport carry the film through its energetically but more predictably conceived latter portions in outer space.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed — except, you know, a drab robot — Wall-E nimbly rolls along on treads through his garbage-dump domain, where latter-day Watts Towers compete with nearby skyscrapers for sheer height. Though humans have long since fled, Wall-E still obeys his programmed duty of crunching, boxing, and stacking. But he hoards personal knickknacks in his hideout, which he shares with an improbably cute cockroach. Whistling while he works (replaying a show tune, strictly speaking), he’s a humble little testament to the happy accident of existence.
Then love strikes, suddenly, with the arrival of Eve from the heavens. Deposited by a spaceship, she’s a hovering white egg of Macintosh-svelte plastic, blue-eyed and quick with a laser. Wall-E falls hard for this busily scanning robot, and one of the film’s smart moves is to avoid the robot-learns-love chestnut in favor of shy, first love. After some near-fatal encounters, Wall-E ends up sheltering Eve in his home — think two strangers seeking cover from the rain.
Their nascent courtship, conducted in the retro-synth burbles and vocoder-arpeggiated name-calling that comprise their dialogue, is cut short by a seedling. Wall-E, who found the lone bit of resilient vegetation on his forays, shows it to Eve, who latches on to it and shuts down, in apparent adherence to a prime directive to collect life. When her ship returns and reclaims her, we’re an enchanting stowaway ride away from the movie’s next phase.
The sprawling, top-heavy “Axiom” ship is inhabited by the descendants who fled Earth centuries ago. They’re now shaped like bean bags, and they’re glued to monitors and floating easy chairs. The anticonsumerist satire is friendly yet hard to ignore, rather like the hefty, literally cartoonish earthlings in red bodysuits. But it’s the look of the ship that underlines the almost foolhardy originality of Pixar’s aesthetic care. Eve’s sleek white blip, earlier the exception to the photographically vivid analog scruffiness of Wall-E and his environs, is extrapolated here to bot-swarmed corridors with a preponderance of muted whites and grays, the opposite of what one might expect from a child-friendly medium.
“Wall-E” more than compensates for the risk of this visual scheme with both the peppy eye-candy of treats (such as the ship’s pool-centered Lido Deck) and with a few nods to storytelling conventions. The best-executed of these is the trail of self-discovery that our durable, nonconforming hero leaves behind in his attempts to reunite with Eve. He liberates the ship’s organic inhabitants (including its ineffectual captain, voiced by Jeff Garlin), as well as the rebellious inorganic ones, from their comfortable ruts.
Not so enthralling, if inevitable, is the series of hectic chase scenes and pulling together that round out the movie and conclude that even in a disposable world, the world itself is not disposable.
But “Wall-E” is unmistakably a movie by Pixar, whose favorable win-loss record and reputation for animated entertainment with integrity can become a burdensome story in itself. In “Wall-E,” which was written and directed by Pixar lifer Andrew Stanton, the studio pulls off its customary visually efficient storytelling, which in this case has garnered hype for lacking anything resembling conventional dialogue in the film’s first half. But an equally important sound-related feat is Thomas Newman’s engaging score, which ranges from majestic melancholy on Earth to catchy electro-funky motifs on the Axiom. Pixar’s cheeky take on throwaway Disneyfied culture, in which mankind is managed by a folksy corporation called Buy-N-Large, avoids mindless pop-culture references and features diverting touches such as the live-action appearance of the Buy-N-Large CEO (Fred Willard) and an amusing update to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The sincerity at the heart of “Wall-E” also counteracts the self-satisfaction that has cropped up in some past Pixar craft (excluding “Ratatouille”). One intriguing habit remains, however, and that’s the curious penchant for dramatizing its status as an innovator of its young art form. Remy of “Ratatouille,” Flik of “A Bug’s Life,” and the diabolical inventor and regulated superheroes of “The Incredibles” were all boundary-busting artistes in one fashion or another. Besides Wall-E’s Pixar-esque struggle to bridge emotional divides across analog and digital barriers, the movie features another playful yet ambitious take on the company’s place in the grand scheme: an end-credit sequence that restages the whole history of Western art, cave paintings through Impressionism (and infinity?) and beyond — in animated form.