Review: Wall-E

I don’t know if a science-fiction movie should be judged by the casting of its fictional president, because well that would make Deep Impact (Morgan Freeman) or Independence Day (Bill Pullman) seem like half-way decent entertainment. But I have to admire the chutzpah of placing Fred Willard as the President/CEO of Earth in Pixar’s WallE. Rare that an actors face shows up in one of Pixar’s CGI films, even if it is ‘archival footage.’ Nevertheless, Willard’s all-smiles, no brains (but really there is a brain) vintage comedy fits perfectly into the science fiction tale where big box stores, privatization and consumer detritus have made life on earth forfeit. That all is left is a single garbage handling unit (well and his cockroach companion, natch) who is all the lonelier for having as his only emotional anchor the innocent and saccharine Hello Dolly! If holding hands while staring into your partners eyes is the ultimate physical expression of true love, then WallE, with his large grips and larger puppy-dog eyes seems born to do so.

There are just mountains of garbage and dust-clouds for an extended (and sublime) wordless introduction the world of WallE, until two curious things happen. A) WallE finds a plant, for which the possibilities and significance are lost on him, and B) a companion robot comes to town on a surveying mission, which, judging by the yearning in his eyes (and body language), the possibilities and significance are not. The fact that the film starts with a mountain of garbage a world-spanning super-corporation which owns everything and a population dumbed down to ‘drink-from-a-straw’ food and flashy, empty video monitors (oh yea, and advertising, advertising, advertising) makes this look like Pixar’s stab at Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (the casting of Kathy “Peggy Hill” Najimy in a tiny speaking part seems to also lend credence). I adore Brad Bird’s how Ratatouille aimed to stretch its audience, and the same is true for WallE. Let me postulate that WallE is the film that Enchanted should have been. Instead of Disney taking the facile and over-done target of princess/fairytale gender politics (and still falling on its face in its aim to please), Pixar throws a loaded cannon ball across the bow of the mother corporation for making the hermetically sealed Disneyland (happy ignorance) and the endless merchandising of instantaneously disposable plastic toys (happy meal) be the destruction of the planet, and (over the process of 700 years) turning people into immobile slugs. Underscored triply by the last vestige of civilization blissfully ignorant on a pandering paradise of a cruise ship, every whim indulged with zero (negative) progress as the result. And get this, the ship is called Axiom (as Wikipedia tells me, ‘is a proposition considered to be self evident’)!

But really the film plays out like an inverted E.T. with Wall-E (who in hindsight looks and acts a lot more like Spielberg’s creation than Johnny #5) bringing folks home via a plant specimen, rather than gathering them for study on his own world. There are elements of many science fiction films wonderfully woven into the fabric of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey being the big point (Zarathustra, The Blue Danube and HAL all make an appearance), but also elements from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I Am Legend, Star Wars (the droid aspects and sound designer Ben Burtt whose signature is palpable) and curiously Peter Jackson’s King Kong (the added, but not extraneous, New York ice skate here is re-purposed to a whimsical robot mating-dance in the vacuum of space). Sigourney Weaver makes a vocal cameo as the voice of the computer, perhaps a gag on her communications officer in Galaxy Quest, but more likely a sly reference to Mother on board the Nostromo (another great ship name) in Alien. Ultimately the film wants to be (and succeeds in being} vintage populist cinema, a fusion of the energetic and clever WB cartoons from the 40s, the classy silent cinema of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati and above all, a drippy ode-to-love musical one can get breezily lost in. Curious that Disney has been cutting out the musical numbers out of their films for some time, their 2D animated films have always been the ersatz musicals after MGM and the other big studios stopped making them. WallE captures the most important thing that Pixar strives for: Wonder (and heart). It cannot be rushed and it has to grow organically; even if that is out of the mountain of garbage (judging by the trailers in front of WallE) that is becoming the CGI kids film strata.