This is not my favorite Pixar feature. I’d put it a notch above Cars. WALL-E (or Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth class) is the last remaining moving thing on the planet (apart form a dedicated and unnamed roach). The year, we learn later, is roughly 2815, and for approximately 700 years, the WALL-E units have been cleaning up the Earth in order to make it, once again, life sustainable. All of the other WALL-E units have fizzled out and stopped working, but our one little WALL-E happily goes about his business compacting units of waste and piling them into tall, sky scraper-like formations. If one of his parts breaks or malfunctions, there are plenty of other dead Wall-E units lying around to pilfer from. In fact, WALL-E keeps a large supply of spare parts (and other curiosities, ranging from rubber duckies to zippo lighters) in his little home, which is something of a shrine to the mindless consumerism that destroyed the planet. This is one of the few interesting ideas of the story: WALL-E is pretty much like us. He’s a pack rat. But the idea isn’t really developed into something one can wrap one’s head around. Anyway, while at work, WALL-E finds a small plant growing in an old refrigerator. He takes it back to his home and puts it with all the other stuff he’s accumulated. Then comes a probe named, appropriately, Eve, who is seeking signs of plant life. WALL-E spots her and instantly falls in love. As a token of his affection, he gives her the plant, which Eve immediately scans. The data is uploaded to the space station that has dispatched her. The space station, built by the conglomerate Buy ‘N’ Large, is home to thousands (or millions, it’s hard to say) of humans who long ago abandoned their garbage heap of a planet. I say humans, but they’ve devolved into morbidly obese carbon units. This is where WALL-E takes a Matrix-like turn (I think) for the worse.
I’ll leave the synopsis at that. The best part of the film, for me, was the first 45 minutes or so. Mostly silent, the film just follows WALL-E around as he does his routine, which consists of spending the day piling the little cubes of garbage (all the while picking and choosing among the waste heaps little knick-knacks that catch his fancy) then returning home where he spends much of his time watching a videocassette (hooked up to an iPod of course) of Hello Dolly and dreaming of the day he finds his perfect partner. I don’t know how to describe the first half of the film. I think the creators are clearly aiming at something lyrical and poetic, like a Chaplin film. Once we’re in the space station, it’s all mayhem and noise. And since there’s no (or little) exposition, one gives up trying to make sense of it all. Whereas with Ratatouille, the filmmakers did such a remarkable job creating and sustaining spatial logic (see David Denby’s review from The New Yorker) one could lose oneself in every little detail, with WALL-E I felt I just kept waiting for the film to gather itself together. That never happened. instead, it sort of clunk along with a few very soft and somewhat uninspired twists.
For instance [SPOILER], when the plant is stolen from Eve, one assumes someone or some thing is conspiring to prevent the humans from ever returning to earth. Perhaps Buy ‘N’ Large has no intention of giving up the corporate utopia it has created, no intention of returning its customers/citizens to earth. Who wants to keep the human/beluga whales blissfully ignorant of their own past, and why? But no, it turns out the auto-pilot is simply following a top secret directive given long ago (by a live action Fred Willard?). So, after a little pluck, a little individual gutso and stick-to-itiveness, a chase or two, and presto: your happy ending! All along, I hung on in the hopes that something would surprise me. But no, we get Spielberged.
The one thing that Pixar cannot fail at is visuals. And here, as in all the other Pixar films, the visuals indeed delight. But they don’t really dazzle. There are several problems inherent in the subject the filmmakers have chosen. The earth, now a massive waste heap, is not much to look at. Just one garbage tower after another. WALL-E himself is a treat, as is his little home. But the wasteland is redundant. Same goes for the space ship (each human is pretty much a carbon copy of the other). And the few moments in actual space are few and not very interesting. Basically, the film seemed empty. With emptiness, there is no detail.
A Pixar film has to be seen on the big screen, so go see it. But don’t expect much (from this, or the Pixar short that precedes it…looking back on it, I should have taken the lackluster short as a sign of things to come). Hope someone can say something more interesting about it than I.
I liked it more than you, John, but I think you are right that after the first lovely 45 minutes the film loses some of its bearings onboard that ship. Or, rather, loses its fascinating bearinglessness — that first section is not merely without dialogue, it’s intriguingly disconnected from any clear sense of narrative purpose. WALL-E’s one job is squeeze trash into squares, and stack ’em, and even *that* repetitive, rather pointless job is consistently set aside for a found object. What frustrated me about the shipboard sequence was the intrusion of a sense of conflict into what had been, for this viewer, an almost edenic reverie with a character ceaselessly intrigued by the world around him. (The hell with plot: what’s that? And that? And that?) Even EVE’s arrival bears intriguing fruits, (MINOR SPOILERS) especially when she freezes into standby mode, and we see a number of sweet, very funny vignettes as WALL-E drags her around, his companion even in her stasis.
And there’s a couple things that hit me. One is the palpable loneliness throughout the film, from robot to the future fatties, who shaken out of their mobile recliners are rather startled (and excited) to shake hands with this robot (or one another). You mention that the film Spielbergs us, and that’s interesting–because the ultimate (happy) return to Earth and romantic (re)union of WALL-E and EVE still seem a far cry from the kind of happy community reclamation we’re accustomed to in our comedies. Every other Pixar film, for instance, closes with scenes of a restoration of community values, protagonists comfortably reinserted and reinvested amongst the meaningful life of the group. And there’s certainly the inclination toward such conclusion here, but it’s inferred, not denoted. I found it interesting that the final “real” shot of the film tracks away from the returned humans and robots (relatively small figures in the vast wastelands around them) to a field of plants… and we go into a credit sequence that spells out a bit more directly the happy end, but in an alternate animated style that deserves its own careful explication. There’s the hope of community, but it’s still merely hope.
Throughout the film there are these moments where WALL-E interrupts the isolated lives of other characters, whether the directive-driven monomania of his fellow robots or the wall of entertainment around each human — and in each instance, there’s this small gesture: a hand wave, a surprised “hello.” These moments are funny because of their relative insignificance, yet they clearly mean so very much to the characters undergoing them — hints of Jacques Tati’s and Buster Keaton’s worlds, where the comedy comes from a desire for real (human?) connection, and small human details and interactions derail the work of large systems. But momentarily; the systems chug along. The hint of failure hangs more heavily over this comedy than any other “children’s” film I can think of. (And this reminds me why I found Cars so damned uninspiring; it was about learning not to bask in the false pleasures of success.)
And yet the flirtation with failure is not a rejection of work, mission. For all the loneliness, for all the distance from others, there is still a keen pleasure (or desire) among many of the characters for doing a job and doing it well. One of my favorite moments comes when a small robot (M-O, pronounced Moe), charged with scrubbing foreign contaminants from the surfaces around him, sees WALL-E’s tracks off to the side of its directive-mapped route along a hall, and it stops, and you can almost hear the heightened whir of its thinking, and then there’s a visceral pop and spark as makes the decision to jump off track…. and then, freed from its mandate, it begins happily scrubbing away at the tracks, in whatever direction they lead. WALL-E, too, seems not lazy or distracted but fully in love with his work–he’s just expanded and complicated and found personal investment in what exactly that job is supposed to be.
You’ll note I’m rambling here, and I’m almost aggressively avoiding the seemingly-central thematics of environmental degradation and consumer culture. Sure, they’re there, and the messages are heartfelt and, as so often with the heartfelt, a bit obvious and underwhelming. But what struck me, what enraptured me, was the attention paid to work, and to leisure–to activity. What purpose do activities have? WALL-E is a comedy in some ways about finding meaning in the mindless, the trash(y) — in directive or detritus. Sure, there’s all that stuff about tending plants, and being a good steward to what you have, and … etc. But the failure of the autopilot (Otto) is that it’s on autopilot, unable to wave as WALL-E passes by or even to enjoy the work it so righteously tries to do. Like Ratatouille, a film about finding craft and personal investment in whatever task is to hand. Do it well, and enjoy doing it.
But there’s no getting around the rather dizzyingly interesting central contradiction. A film that presents consumers as grotesqueries, so wholly consumed by consuming that they do not even realize their ship has a pool (around which their mobile recliners are geometrically arrayed), yet also has at its heart a protagonist in love with literal trash. Finding beauty in crap like Hello, Dolly! or discarded lighters.
I think I’m less making a case for the film’s greatness of message than, while agreeing with your smart reading of the film’s confusion, making a case for why that confusion is so worth our interested attention. This film has a lot going on, and besides being moved and entertained and dazzled I often found myself–still, a day after seeing it, find myself–poring over its facets, intrigued.
This was very long, far longer than I’d intended. Sorry.
Wow. Well, this is exactly what I had hoped for when I wrote my post. I can’t agree with you more, reynolds. This was the movie I saw but was unable to write about.
But now, after mulling over your post and my initial reactions to the film, I wonder if you’ve brought to my mind the film the Pixar folks wanted to make but fell short of making. I mean, you’re right to point out the small gestures, but there are too few (too many would have been just as bad). There’s one hand wave. And there should have been a little more M-O. Will Pixar ever dare to give us two hours?
I am more than willing to give this film my full attention, which is why I posted. And I love reynolds’s reading. But these beautiful idea-images he mentions are worthy of some more screen time. As I sit here trying to figure out how to end this reply, all I can think of is that time and thought was sabotaged by movement and action. Everything reynolds describes above is what the film aspires to be. But in the end, there’s a directive. And even our hero gives up detritus for directive.
Yeah, you’re right. I thought more through the night, and I realize re-reading your post this morning that I appreciate/d more than enjoyed the film. I blamed that on being surrounded by kids (little fuckers), but I think the film is ambitious yet less successful than it might have been. Still, these are the complaints of a fan, and I very much recommend the film to everyone here….