Wall-E
A Walmart Brand robot develops a personality and deep emotional problems after 700 years of cleaning up world-covering garbage that appears to have miraculously avoided all advertising and signage
My rating: stars
Wall-E is one of those movies that people love to gush over; where a cute something with no voice of it’s own falls in love with the notion of love and then overcomes everything just to get his limited groove on. Sometimes there is dancing, sometimes there is singing, sometimes there is some chaste kissing; however it is always stulifying and boring. Great for the kids, right?
Let me summarize Wall-E for those of you who have not seen it or refuse to do so, as you are principled people who don’t need Cartoon Robots to feel good about
Hello Dolly Song !
Fly-in through Garbage
There’s alot of Garbage
More Garbage, set to Hello Dolly Tune
Big Wall-E! Big Wall-E
Fat People all over the place
Fat Babies!
More Garbage
Hello Dolly Tune
End.
I don’t know if that is what some people took from it, but that’s about it for me. There was no there, there. Even for a kids movie, this was pretty pointless. Pixar has been pretty good about avoiding the “Song And Dance” methodology of Disney flicks, but only through having soundtrack montages and so on. It’s still a baseless little story about a crazy robot who wants nothing more than to “hold hands” with someone. It’s like American Pie, without the Stiffler or the Shannon Elizabeth.
The empty story is dressed in some nice clothes, but it’s fairly empty. I know the guys at Pixar worked very hard to build pathos for Wall-E; but in the end he is just a malfunctioning robot who has become obsessed with fulfilling his own dreams. Wall-E isn’t saving humanity, that’s not even in his scope, he’s obsessed with achieving the one thing that he has built up over years of watching Hello Dolly over and over, holding hands. At least Eve focuses on her actual function over self-gratification.
The Animation is passable, but it’s not ground-breaking for 3D animation and does little to further 3D movies as an artform or medium. I didn’t find any portion of the film to be breathtaking (save breathtakingly stupid or vapid) and I couldn’t get over the details that ruined the whole premise. Why would the robot repair all of the advertising but not dig up all the garbage from around it? Why does the robot “go back” to his house rather than move to closer to his work site? Why didn’t the robot build a wind-proof baffle around his little home so that he could leave the door open? Why didn’t he build a shelter for Eve? These little things detracted from the experience, it’s just poor storytelling when you can actually visually build anything and don’t simply solve these little logical problems right there on film.
Wall-E is a film about garbage that barely rises above it’s oeuvre. I’d say it’s okay for the kids, but only the youngest seem to want to watch it over and over. Go watch Monsters Inc. or Iron Giant instead, there’s a movie with real heart and emotion.
Why I Disliked Wall-E, Redux
Published by NiteMayr on September 24, 2008I don’t shy away from critics. I engage the Tomoatoes when I am about to go check out a movie that I haven’t already declared “too wicked to avoid for any rational reason” so the reviews, like the one above, mislead me about the quality of Wall-E and lead me to believe that the overgrown manandwomen-children who wrote these bits of fawning praise have taken leave of the hormones that allowed them to leave bald armpits behind.
Pixar is rapidly becoming the Apple of movies (if I remember correctly, it already is) where droves of fawning fans will crawl over each other to obtain the next bit of stuff that is farted loose from the bowells of the beast and they will love it because it is in a cute, non-threatening container, which Wall-E embodies almost as much as his erstwhile gal-pal Eve the I-Pod.
Then there is the heavy handed story, which I complained about previously, so I will only tarry on long enough to say that any halfwit who goes through that much for a “kiss” is not a romantic, they are an insanely focused stalker with serious emotional problems. Movies like this set me up for 5 years of emotional retardation and a firm belief that grand romanticism is what girls “wanted” (in truth they want to be treated like humans and occasionally like a princess or naughty slave girls or naught school librarians or naughty shop keepers … I’m getting off the topic here)
As I was saying, the critical response to Wall-E was overtly praise-laden and should have been reserved for the ressurection of Messers Einstein and Tesla in their all robot dancing girl review and kids fun-e-teria.