WALL•E (2008)

[svsg]

Wall-e

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Andrew Stanton

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English 2008

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Two robots fall in love in a futuristic society

Though I admire the technical achievements, I am usually unimpressed by animation films. I cannot connect to them thematically. But Wall-e breaks all those barriers for me. Some of the themes the movie addresses are extremely interesting. What is it to be human? How do you define "dancing" to someone who has no idea what it is, without being reductive? And so on. Plus great achievements in terms of emotional expressions with just the eyes of robots. Great stuff. This is not the usual kiddie animation Hollywood has fed us with over years. Go watch it like today.

[RNL]

I saw this last night and quite enjoyed it, but I was disappointed after having liked Ratatouille so much.

Pixar's feature films are often upstaged by the shorts that precede them. That's true here again, but for different reasons than usual: WALL·E is basically what you'd get if you tried to develop one of the cinematic Pixar shorts into a feature. There are only two acts, and each is like one of Pixar's 5-minute shorts stretched out to 40 minutes. That's a bit of a simplification, but it's basically true. In the shorts (like One Man Band, Geri's Game, Lifted, Presto) you have a single scenario and a single concept around which all the jokes are structured, and there's no dialogue and no plot or character development. In the first half of WALL·E the jokes center around WALL·E trying to get EVE's attention, and in the second half they center around WALL·E and EVE chasing the plant around the spaceship. There is more to it than that, obviously, but everything else is peripheral and that's the central structure of the film. It has very little flow to it, feeling like a couple of drawn-out & padded cartoon comedy sketches (I mean, could you make a feature-length Wile E. Coyote movie?), and the material it's padded with isn't that well conceived or integrated; the conflict with the ship's autopilot seems like an afterthought and the cultural satire is fairly pedestrian (Futurama set a pretty high benchmark), and also WALL·E is just far too cute, to the point where the jokes are mostly dependent upon his being just soooo adorable. I found that a bit grating; not that there isn't some sophisticated and inspired visual comedy to be had.

I thought it was interesting, incidentally, that there's a real reliance on the trailer and other promotional material to establish the character in anticipation of the film, there's not much in the way of exposition or setup at the beginning.

[svsg]

WALL.E >> Ratatouille

[RNL]

But Ratatouille wasn't an overdose of cute, and was coherent character-based drama as opposed to an extended comedy sketch.

Keeping in mind I haven't seen a few of these in a very long time, I rank Pixar's movies thusly:

1. Toy Story (1995)
2. Ratatouille (2007)
3. Toy Story 2 (1999)
4. The Incredibles (2004)
5. Finding Nemo (2003)
6. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
7. WALL·E (2008)
8. A Bug's Life (1998)
9. Cars (2006)

[Capo]

1. The Incredibles
2. Finding Nemo
3. Ratatouille
4. Toy Story
5. Cars

(And I really liked Cars.)

[Mike Sullivan]

My rankings:

1. Toy Story
2. Wall-E
3. Ratatoullie
4. Monsters Inc.
5. Toy Story 2
6. Cars
7. A Bug's Life

[svsg]

Jul 19, 2008 19:45:53 GMT RNL said:

I thought it was interesting, incidentally, that there's a real reliance on the trailer and other promotional material to establish the character in anticipation of the film, there's not much in the way of exposition or setup at the beginning.

Good point. Even I thought about this. I had not watched any of the trailers before and when I read the reviews, I was wondering how those people had so much information about the movie. I did not even know that Walle was the last robot on earth. I just thought that he was the only one in that particular place.

[Capo]

I thought this was excellent.

[svsg]

For that comment, two virgins will be sent to Gateshead for your pleasure

[Mike Sullivan]

Silly man. Virgins can't really bring pleasure.

[Kino]

Jul 12, 2008 18:35:53 GMT @svsg said:

Wall-e

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Andrew Stanton

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English 2008

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Two robots fall in love in a futuristic society

Though I admire the technical achievements, I am usually unimpressed by animation films. I cannot connect to them thematically. But Wall-e breaks all those barriers for me. Some of the themes the movie addresses are extremely interesting. What is it to be human? How do you define "dancing" to someone who has no idea what it is, without being reductive? And so on. Plus great achievements in terms of emotional expressions with just the eyes of robots. Great stuff. This is not the usual kiddie animation Hollywood has fed us with over years. Go watch it like today.

Have you seen Grave of the Fireflies? It's content is pretty grown up. That and Barefoot Gen deal with war.

I think you'd connect with the character's desire to create a work of art in Whisper of the Heart. Though, it's from a child/teen's perspective.

Only Yesterday is an animated film that feels really grown up. It's one of my all-time favorite films. Period. I think it's alternate titles - Memories of Teardrops/Memories of Yesterday - would be really attractive to you.

[svsg]

Thanks for the recommendations, I haven't watched any of these. What is your opinion on Wall-E? And Dark Knight (it has a thread of its own)?

[Kino]

I love Wall-E. My favorite 2008 movie so far. It's my favorite Pixar, too.

Dark Knight is good which is a favorable reaction.

[svsg]

I watched it again today and it was equally (but unexpectedly) powerful even for the second time viewing. I haven't watched any other animation movies from 2008, but I am confident that this will be an Oscar favorite.

[Omar]

I've been slow at seeing recent releases....recently (though not much has really interested me), so for my money, this is the best film I've seen of 2008.

[Capo]

Me too.

[RNL]

I stand by my contrariness.

[Omar]

We wouldn't have it any other way.

[Blib]

WALL-E was great! It's a simple movie but very powerful to me. Interesting idea to have humanity restored by two robots falling in love.

[arkadyrenko]

Believe it or not, my final opinion of this movie is of a disapointment. And not becasue i think the movie is bad or inferior. I'll explain:

I think the first half of the movie is one of the mosr brillant pieces of cinema i ever seen. Not just animation, CINEMA! Thjere's absolutly nothing, nothing i can see in it that i find at fault. It's sheer perfection!

But then it came the second half, which is riddled with cliches and stock characters and banal cliched SF stuff about how the human spirit can overcome conditioning and evil artifical intelligence bad guys and whatnot and so forth and so forth.... and it's all very boring. Mind you, the comed is good, i mean, who didn't laugh at the exasperated cleaning robot? It's good comedy, but the story itself is just... well, i think they wrote more inovative and modern SF in the bloody 40s!!!

In the second half of WALL-E, there is not one single Sf cliched that has become old and pudrid by the early 70s! And the thing is, it culd had been so easily avoided!!! Truly, i cannot find the imagination and geniality which was resoponsible for the first half of the movie in the second part. If the entire movie had been the second half, nobody would be claiming it a masterpiece, and rightly so. Nobody would be giving a crap of the movie, and it would had been immediatly forgotten after the theatrical run.

WALL-E rides on the great strenghs of the first half. Had the whole movie been just the first half, it would be the CITIZEN KANE of animation, and one of the best instant movie classics from the last 10 years. Unfortunatly, there's the wretched second half which, frankly, and pardon my french, fucks it up! It's not Michael Bay fuck up, but it's a Ron howard fuck up, and that's a fuck up bad enough! It's a sad fate for the brillince that had came before.

So, doing the maths, BRILLANT FIRST HALF + CLICHED UNIMAGINATIVE OLD-HAT SF NONSENSE BULLSHIT = Deep Disapointment.

If you ask me, the second half would had improved if when WALL-E reaches the space-ship, he wouldbn't find any humans in it, only a ship going thorugh it's motions and only populated by then robots. You would gain three things with this: 1) for the kids, it means they would still see lots of cute robots going around and doing funny things, and keep on the brillant approach of the first half of the movie; 2) the adults would realise that "waqit a minute, where's the humans? wait, they all died out!!". The movie would gain an extra dimention for them. The kids wouldn't be aware of this darker implication, but the adults would get a new dimention to the movie to chew on; 3) the little kids who love the movie now, when they grew up and rewatched the mvie, they would relaise that their kid favorite movie now gains a new dimention they didn't realsied before, and thus, they would WATCH THE MOVIE ANEW. It would be as if they hadn't seen the movie before. This kind of rediscovery of classic of our childhood which, in adult years, we rediscover then hidden meanings we didn't understand when we were kids, this is great exciting stuff.

Unfortunatly, WALL-E, thanks to it's uninspired half-arsed second half, is a movie without any ambiguities, any second readings, without any new suprised to be stored for a future watch. And i don't rate that as a quality.