WALL-E
On Friday night Alana and I went to see the latest offering from Pixar - WALL-E. Some very minor spoilers do follow, so if you want to go into the film knowing nothing best hit the 'back' button or 'next blog' button now.
Before the main feature was another Pixar short animation about a magician and his hungry bunny rabbit. Very clever and very funny. We then got to our main feature WALL-E just as we finished our noisy crunching of potato crisps and Twisties and threw our chip packets on the floor by our feet. By the end of the film we found ourselves picking up our chip packets and I found myself thinking about how much waste two people were able to so quickly generate. None of which is even able to be recycled at present.
The film is set on Earth in the not too distant future and Earth is completely covered by piles of rubbish and the sky is filled with dust and pollution. No sign of human or plant life remains and vehicles and remnants of robots litter the streets of a city. Giant piles of rubbish built into towering structures are intermingled between the other skyscrapers.
From this brief description of the setting, you might be forgiven in thinking that WALL-E is going to be a depressing or perhaps even preachy film. Not at all. Of course the setting is an important background for the story to take place in, but the narrative overlaid on this distopia is one of agency, hope and a love story.
The hero of this story is a small, square, dirty robot called WALL-E. He traverses the city by tracks, scooping up garbage into his square stomach and then producing small compacted cubes of garbage that he builds into giant towers of garbage. It soon becomes clear that WALL-E is almost all alone on Earth as he passes by other broken down WALL-E robots. His only companion is his pet cockroach. WALL-E spends some of his time collecting discarded things that interest him like lighters and rubix cubes. At night, before he shuts down, in his protective container which used to house all the WALL-Es, he watches old movies with singing and dancing. It becomes clear that the humans have left the planet and left the solar powered WALL-Es there to clean up the mess.
The film makes excellent use of various devices like his quirks and his care for his pet cockroach to make you care for WALL-E and by the end of the film I cared more about WALL-E than I often care about many human actors.
One day WALL-E discovers something he has never before seen - a freshly germinated green plant. This he takes back to his container and becomes a significant part of the unfolding story, as a giant ship lands nearby and WALL-E is no longer alone on Earth.
Pixar films are almost genre films, so keep this in mind, when I'd say that for a Pixar film WALL-E is 4 pixels out of 5 pixels! Strongly recommend, as I found it much better than CARS or The Incredibles.
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Alana also made another lovely discovery of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which is co-written by Buffy creator Joss Whedon. A funny, brilliantly written, original postmodern pastiche. You can buy it off iTunes for $2 an episode. Well worth the $6 for all three episodes.
Before the main feature was another Pixar short animation about a magician and his hungry bunny rabbit. Very clever and very funny. We then got to our main feature WALL-E just as we finished our noisy crunching of potato crisps and Twisties and threw our chip packets on the floor by our feet. By the end of the film we found ourselves picking up our chip packets and I found myself thinking about how much waste two people were able to so quickly generate. None of which is even able to be recycled at present.
The film is set on Earth in the not too distant future and Earth is completely covered by piles of rubbish and the sky is filled with dust and pollution. No sign of human or plant life remains and vehicles and remnants of robots litter the streets of a city. Giant piles of rubbish built into towering structures are intermingled between the other skyscrapers.
From this brief description of the setting, you might be forgiven in thinking that WALL-E is going to be a depressing or perhaps even preachy film. Not at all. Of course the setting is an important background for the story to take place in, but the narrative overlaid on this distopia is one of agency, hope and a love story.
The hero of this story is a small, square, dirty robot called WALL-E. He traverses the city by tracks, scooping up garbage into his square stomach and then producing small compacted cubes of garbage that he builds into giant towers of garbage. It soon becomes clear that WALL-E is almost all alone on Earth as he passes by other broken down WALL-E robots. His only companion is his pet cockroach. WALL-E spends some of his time collecting discarded things that interest him like lighters and rubix cubes. At night, before he shuts down, in his protective container which used to house all the WALL-Es, he watches old movies with singing and dancing. It becomes clear that the humans have left the planet and left the solar powered WALL-Es there to clean up the mess.
The film makes excellent use of various devices like his quirks and his care for his pet cockroach to make you care for WALL-E and by the end of the film I cared more about WALL-E than I often care about many human actors.
One day WALL-E discovers something he has never before seen - a freshly germinated green plant. This he takes back to his container and becomes a significant part of the unfolding story, as a giant ship lands nearby and WALL-E is no longer alone on Earth.
Pixar films are almost genre films, so keep this in mind, when I'd say that for a Pixar film WALL-E is 4 pixels out of 5 pixels! Strongly recommend, as I found it much better than CARS or The Incredibles.
...
Alana also made another lovely discovery of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which is co-written by Buffy creator Joss Whedon. A funny, brilliantly written, original postmodern pastiche. You can buy it off iTunes for $2 an episode. Well worth the $6 for all three episodes.
2 comments:
My three boys (14;13;10) and my wife loved it. Good review, and I also enjoyed Cars and The Incredibles so if you rate it more highly than them, I'll have to get it on DVD. BTW, if you send ladlitter@hotmail.com your email address, I'd like to put you on my list as my blog is now invite only. Thanks.
I never thought of this movie that way... There's much worthy in your words. Anyway, the movie makes us all think about different but important things. Download Wall-E from rapidshare
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