A Statement About WALL-E

There has been much said about the wonder that is the Disney/Pixar masterpiece, WALL-E, and I am pleased to report that nothing you have read has been exaggeration.  Like The Incredibles before it, WALL-E will win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and was perfectly qualified to be a Best Picture contender. 

To start, it is a visual feast, from the rusty, dirty Earth that WALL-E inhabits, to the chrome and bleached shininess of the spaceship he eventually stumbles upon.  Yes, the film is a blatant attack on consumerism (see: WALL-E finding a diamond ring in a box... he keeps the box and trashes the ring), gluttony, and the waste that had pervaded our culture over the past several decades.  The humans in the story are hilariously dis-abled, unable to even stand without assistance.  They are carted around on portable beds, and none of them even realize there is a swimming pool on their spaceship until the video screens are forcibly removed from the front of their faces.

What I like about WALL-E, though, is that it might be the best love story I have seen in the past year.  Isolated and alone on his planet, one day WALL-E encounters EVE, a robot sent from the human ship to seek organic and sustaining life on Earth, life WALL-E himself only discovered shortly before her arrival.  Theirs is obviously a chaste love, this is Disney after all, and they are robots, but the depth of feeling they have is remarkable.  After finding WALL-E's plant, EVE shuts down to protect the specimen, and when she is called back to the ship, WALL-E follows her on a journey through space, to be with her and to make sure she is okay.

Likewise, when WALL-E is seriously injured in the film's climactic sequence, EVE rushes him back to Earth, replacing his damaged parts, willing him to live.  In the end, it is the physical spark generated by their "kiss" that makes him remember his true love.

It is thoroughly endearing, too, that the characters very rarely speak to each other-- he calls her E-VA, while her main vocabulary consists of her mission, her "directive."

If you haven't seen it already, watch it watch it watch it.  A while back we had a discussion about what is a "good" movie, and how that can be different from your "favorite" movie.  The Incredibles remains my favorite Disney/Pixar film, but it is indisputable that WALL-E is the best.