WALL-E

What would happen if the humans left Earth and left the robots on to clean up? And if one robot out lived all the others? Would he have a personality? Would he have learned to love? Would he have an amazing tale of his survival?...

700 hundred years after man has left Earth, on what was originally supposed to be a five year trip, one robot is left working. The humans of Earth left because they polluted the world too much and then they created robots to clean up after them. After these 700 years only one is left in existence and still working away at the clean up. His name is WALL-E and that stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class. This WALL-E goes around the Earth compacting garbage into little cubes and then using the cubes as building blocks for huge building type structures. The Earth is overrun by garbage mostly from the Buy ‘N Large Company. WALL-E loves to collect things and even watches a videotape of an old romantic musical every night. One day WALL-E sees a spaceship land and out from it comes this other robot; EVE, who was sent to Earth to scan for any life forms in order to find out if Earth has come back to a life sustaining level. EVE and WALL-E meet and he falls in love with her. To show EVE his love he gives her a plant that he found and this triggers her programming to kick in and sends a signal back to the spaceship. After days of waiting, the spaceship appears and takes EVE away with WALL-E hanging onto the outside of the ship. This ship takes them to the Axiom, which is an interstellar cruise ship that has all the remaining humans on it. Due to the 700 years of being served by robots, the humans have turned fat and lazy and dependent upon these robots for survival. WALL-E follows EVE around the ship, up to the Captain (Garlin) to inform him of their findings. The ship’s computer tells them to put the plant into a specific plant dock so the ship can properly calculate the coordinates of Earth and take them home. However, the autopilot robot knows that they cannot go back to Earth because it is too polluted. WALL-E and EVE uncover the plot and go through a series of problems before they inform the whole ship, get the plant where it needs to be, and return everyone to Earth to save the day and restart human civilization. Through saving the human race WALL-E continues to fall for EVE, while she eventually learns of his love and returns the feelings, and they all live electronically ever after.

Wow!!! WALL-E was out of this world!! There has never been a movie that is more right up my alley. It has robots, space, is science fiction, and to top it off; it is animated. This movie, to put it simply, is amazing. I do not think I have seen a better animated feature film, and believe me, I have seen at least five times as many as the average Joe. I will tell you now that if you do not see this movie in theaters then you will regret it the rest of your life. The reasons for that being that the sound of this movie is a miraculous thing to behold and then the look of computer animated outer space on the big screen is just as stunning as the photographs we see in the papers.

To start things off; the look was amazing and very well thought out. Seeing the Earth over run with garbage and having no one on it was pretty cool. It certainly gave it a space type feeling. Speaking of space; that was another incredibly designed thing in this movie. You see satellites surrounding Earth, stars, belts, all sorts of awesome cosmic bodies. The look they gave to outer space really gave it the lonely feel that it requires to help with the story of the film. The Axiom, the spaceship, was well designed too. It looked reminiscent of the Starship Enterprise and looked very futuristic inside. Everything was clean and holographic. They even designed the humans’ lifestyles to be futuristic. They had lunch in a cup!! There were floating chairs, holographic screens in your face, color changing clothing and the list continues on. Even all the robots and machines on the ship were well designed to meet specific directives.

All the robots in this picture have intelligent design behind them. There is a massage robot with big arms, a paint robot that has a big extending brush, an umbrella robot, and even a little robot with a bristle brush that follows WALL-E and cleans. EVE’s design is particularly important since she is meant to complement WALL-E. Since WALL-E is blocky, angular, and rusted; EVE is round, clean, new, and sleek. As a matter of fact all the robots were made to look brand new so that WALL-E could stand out more, and he did. WALL-E is a different breed of robot, and that is for sure. Granted, yes, he has similar looks to Johnny 5 of Short Circuit, however, they couldn’t be further apart. WALL-E is smaller, not animatronic, can move his eyes separately, is more mobile, and has a lot more character. The way the PIXAR animators figured out how to give WALL-E character through his motions was by going back and studying PIXAR’s first short Luxo Jr. John Lasseter made an animated short about a lamp when PIXAR first started. The lamp has springs and can only stretch to certain lengths, but Lasseter figured out how to convey emotion and character through static objects. Most of WALL-E’s emotions are shown through his teardrop shaped eyes and by his movements. How WALL-E uses what he was built with is what truly gives him life. A normal WALL-E robot would probably use their parts for their normal directives alone and not for personality functions, but WALL-E did and that is what made him so cute and amazing.

There really is so much to be said about this movie, but I do not want to spoil things for you since I am such a fan of the movie. There are a few inside PIXAR jokes in the movie, as usual. One is A113 appears a few times in the movie and A113 was the room in which animation was taught at Cal Arts when Lasseter was there. A Luxo lamp appears in a garbage block that WALL-E makes. There was a Billy Bass that appears and sings Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry, Be Happy, and he did the music to the PIXAR short Knick Knack. To top things of the Captain tells people they can grow a pizza plant which sounds very similar to pizza planet. This movie really had a lot to offer to people of all ages; adult and childish humor, a story that will steal your heart and an unbelievable amount of cool characters. Even the short Presto that preceded WALL-E was just as amazing as the movie and even more so in the realm of cartoony-ness. WALL-E was by and large a stunning film and you will regret if you miss it in theaters. So put on your Sunday clothes and go see what WALL-E has to offer you. See it glisten, Barnaby!

And that is all!

Run time: 103 mins.

Directed by: Andrew Stanton

Written by: Andrew Stanton

Starring: Ben Burtt, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver, Kathy Najimy, John Ratzenberger, and Elissa Knight.