WALL- E

WALL-E, a Disney/Pixar collaboration. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton Original music by Thomas Newman

LIFE AFTER THE APOCALYPSE OR LOVE WILL FIND A WAY
By Gaetana Caldwell-Smith

Disney/Pixar’s latest animation movie “WALL- E” is an engaging, rich, family film with a serious message that isn’t crammed down our throats. The message has to do with human activity causing “climate change” or “global warming,” rendering the Earth so toxic it is uninhabitable for animal or vegetable life - - oh, with the exception of one cockroach (cockroaches can survive anything, so I hear.) It is also a robot love story. The film opens with the camera panning over a wasteland of crumbling buildings in American cities and desiccated landscapes. Everything is depicted in shades of brown and rust, including the sky; a hazy miasma covers the Earth.

WALL - E (voice: Ben Burtt) is a small, robot, trash collector/compactor/disposal unit that runs on treads. It is programmed to clean and make orderly what humans have abandoned when they rocketed off Earth into space. The largely white, fat and happy, Americans now live in the captained space-ship colony, AXIOM (billing itself as the “Final Funteer”). The rendering of AXIOM inhabitants are unflattering. They all look like six month old babies in their one- piece red rompers, except for the fat Captain (voice:Jeff Garlin) who wears regulation captain garb. Everyone (even he) reclines on motorized Barca Loungers fitted with plasma screens, like waiting-rooms at airports, their every gustatory need voice-commanded and delivered by the ship’s robot (voice: Signory Weaver).

WALL- E looks like a beat-up, urban Dumpster, still, he is a cute, little guy with periscope eyes. He is very discerning. He has saved an old TV and Barbra Streisand’s “Hello Dolly” video which he watches throughout the initial scenes.

At it's start, close to a half-hour of the film is without dialogue or narrative - - just a myriad of electronic beeps and whistles as WALL- E goes about his business, sometimes accompanied by his chirruping cockroach friend. WALL- E’s life is changed by the arrival of a smooth, white, ovoid-shaped , blue-eyed EVE (voice: Elissa Knight), who someone said looks like an Apple invention. EVE has arrived by space ship sent back to Earth on a mission to bring back to AXIOM, proof that toxic Earth is once again inhabitable. After some shoot-first moments on EVE’s part, EVE and WALL- E’s meeting is aw-shucks cute, played out to Louie Armstrong’s “La Vie en Rose,” no less. Mission accomplished, She shuts down; the space ship returns to collect her and WALL- E hitches a ride.

The Pixar animators have outdone themselves with their depiction of EVE’s world. There is an evolved WALL- E - - a small sophisticated white, vacuum cleaner that slides around on the smooth, marked, floors flashing a warning of “Foreign Contaminants” as it sucks up minuscule stuff. When WALL- E finds his way inside the colony, he’s confused to find countless cloned Eves. A later scene of EVE and WALL- E zooming around in outer space, to “2001’s” “ Blue Danube Waltz” is not only lyrically beautiful, but contain some of the best visuals in the film.

Upon the discovery that Earth is once more habitable, the Captain sets a course to return, only to be thwarted for a time by “Otto,” a “2001” Hal-like computer program, and the CEO of AXIOM, Shelby Forthright, appearing via teleconference(played by Fred Willard, the only real human). The film pays tribute to “2001,” not only with Richard Strauss‘s “The Blue Danube,” but also the “2001” opening theme, “Also Spake Zarathustra.” The ending focuses on EVE ministering to WALL - E who had been seriously damaged during the landing. Missing from the film, however, is a scene showing the reactions of the roly-poly men, women and look-alike children, who tumble from the space ship on to a desiccated, deserted earth. Though while the credits run, we see that they did okay. But how they accomplished this could be another film. A sequel perhaps?