At the Movies: WALL•E
I've always thought that the Hummer was the epitome of crass American consumerism — a triumph of want over need, an emasculation of the (usually male) drivers who are desperate to prove something, an excess of power and metal and waste, waste, waste at every corner. I've never really cared about cars (I'm usually more concerned about their drivers), except in this case. That vehicle has long stirred my passion and my ire, because it's just so unnecessary to me.
WALL•E is a work of near genius that does something almost never before seen in a G-rated family film: present a vision of our own destruction as a species. You may argue that the "Rite of Spring" and "Night on Bald Mountain" sequences in Disney's Fantasia portended just that, but they were never this explicit, this sweeping in its damnation of our want over need.
But WALL•E is so much more than that. It is a meditation on who we are and what we can become, how we lose ourselves and how we can redeem our kind. Yes, the main character is a robot, but through the classic model of anthropomorphization, we know that he is us. He is as human as any flesh and blood actor has ever been on screen. He is love and fear, hope and despair, inspiration and monotony.
In the first 20 minutes of the film, which pass without dialogue from our main characters, we see the world that we are now making: controlled by a single conglomerate, overrun with waste, bereft of anything human and populated only the detrius of our manufactured wants. The pinnacle of our decades long move towards cocooning (here in the First World, at least), there is no one left, save a robot who, each day, does his Sisyphean task of cleaning things up and finding small joys in the very routine life he leads. Some people have said this part of the film is wordless. It is not. There's lots of dialogue — just none of it from our hero.
But if WALL•E were just a cautionary tale of the ruined planet we are creating, it would be a fine film, a good film. But the film, like all great cinema, transcends its origins and literally takes flight to become a work of great vision and compassion about who we are as a species. In space we find ourselves again, but changed: children now, pampered and utterly cocooned by technology, we can barely walk, or act of our own volition. It's easy to see ourselves, myself, moving down this path as communication and entertainment converge across a mesh of IP-based traffic, bringing us closer together and offering us endless options for our amusement and enlightenment, but all the while carving out greater and greater physical spaces between us. It's an easy joke in the film, but a sadly true one: we don't see the person sitting right next to us as we're so absorbed in our wirelessly connected mobile entertainment devices. It's useful, sometimes, to actually reach out and touch someone.
I believe, that somewhere in Pixar's early days, John Lasseter and his team said "We will only make films that must be animated. If there's any other way to tell the story, we won't tell it." What I mean by this is: you couldn't make a live action version of "Finding Nemo" or "Toy Story" or "Ratatouille." Well, you could, but they'd look stupid and awful. These stories have to be animated, because there's no other way to tell them. Even "The Incredibles" (which remains Pixar's greatest achievement, in my book) had to be animated to achieve the goals of the story that they wanted to tell. "The Incredibles" could have been done as a live-action film, but it would have lost so much magic, so much of the storytelling detail, and you'd be left with a "Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer" instead.
The animation in WALL•E is utterly spectacular. Dont' be fooled or a second: Although it doesn't look very tough, the sequences when the spaceship first lands on Earth on top of WALL•E are so technically demanding, I can't even imagine how long it took to perfect the textural algorithms nor render. The use of traditional camera focus techniques in the film is unprecedented for a feature-length computer animated film, and I again can only imagine the complexity underneath those subtle, but gorgeous moments.
And the fire extinguisher ballet — my God. It's full of stars.
WALL•E tips its hat, clearly and with great reverence, to so many of the great science fiction films of the last century, most specifically Kubrick's seminal "2001: A Space Odyssey." I firmly believe that this film will take its place alongside the greats of science fiction cinema. Unlike Kubrick's masterpiece, and so many other cinematic visions of our future dystopia, there is hope in WALL•E. The film believes, and made me believe, that we can save ourselves. Our future, as far gone as it seems, is not gone. If we can simply touch one another, learn that our collective humanity is greater than any technology, than any disaster of our own making, then we can survive, and thrive.
