Wall-e

First Hit: The first part of the film is phenomenal and the last part doesn’t stand up as well.

The earth is without people because we polluted it to a point where we had to leave it. All the people were loaded onto a spaceship and now travel the galaxy doing nothing but eating, watching a video screen and expressing our laziness in obvious and recognizable ways. But I get ahead of myself here.

When we left earth we left behind robots to clean up our mess. Wall-e is the only active robot left on earth along with a cockroach. Wall-e’s job is to compact our waste into little cubes and stack the cubes. He works diligently, but stops every once in a while to select something of interest which he saves in a cooler until he gets back home.

You see his sensibilities when he finds a diamond in a ring box, throws out the diamond, and keeps the box. When he and the cockroach return home each night he stores what he has saved, feeds the cockroach, and watches an old video of “Hello Dolly”. He is fascinated with this video and pines for a like feeling when the stars in the video hold hands.

One day a large ship lands and leaves a high-tech white robot, named Eve, which flutters about and examines objects until it feels threatened, and then it blasts a shot from its wing/arm.

The interplay between Wall-e, an industrial robot, and this high tech beauty is absolutely amazing, deep and fulfilling. And for this first 40 – 50 minutes there are only two words spoken. When Eve is given a plant Wall-e finds in a refrigerator she stores the plant inside her, and shuts down until the explorer ship returns.

This ship picks up Eve and as it starts to leave Wall-e jumps on its back and off they go. The explorer ship heads back to the mother ship where the human race is living and it is at this point film becomes more standard fare and loses some of its magic.

The visuals are outstanding, the characterizations of the robots is amazing (especially in the first section) while the overall storyline is a bit dark because it says we don’t stand a chance at saving our planet as we know it today. In some ways I felt it might be beyond a child’s ability to understand this grown up point of view, but that might be short selling our youngest generation. I hope they get it, we need their help.

Overall: I loved this film and, for me, the first 40 – 50 minutes were the most powerfully expressed pure animation minutes ever produced and my congratulations and kudos to Pixar for making this film work so well.

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