Email-A-Friend

Printable Version

 

Wall-E is the latest Pixar all CG (computer generated) kids film that is set to earn a jillion dollars at the box office, a jillion more in merchandise and probably spawn a ride and possibly a parade at one or more of the 11 Disneyland parks worldwide.  It’s about the year 2810 and things on Earth are pretty bleak probably due to a long garbage truck strike.  Big piles of garbage are everywhere just like in the future time travel film, Idiocracy (2006).  Coincidence?  

 

Garbage has forced humans to move onto a big space ship called the Axiom and drift around in space while the inhabitants grow obese and live like cruise shippers 365 days a year.  Wall-E is a small, cute boxy robot with human traits who lives on Earth and slowly works on cleaning up and compacting the mess left behind.  

 

He has a cockroach pal and a collection of curios.  He loves musicals although he only has one on videotape.  The musical scenes in Wall-E are with Michael Crawford in Hello, Dolly (1969).  There were no robots in Hello Dolly unless you count Barbra Streisand’s acting.  

 

Soon Eve, a female but well armed robot, arrives from the mother ship seeking life.  She is cute but deadly.  Love is in the air.  Although none of it is breathable it doesn’t matter since neither robot breathes.  

 

Ecological themes borrowed from the Bruce Dern film Silent Running (1971) become predominant.  Silent Running also had cute boxy robots that acted human.  Coincidence?

 

Other sci-fi films whose themes pop in include Short Circuit (1985) and Heart Beeps (1981) the one where robots Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters fall in love. Coincidence?  

 

2001 A Space Odyssey had a bad guy named HAL, the computer.  He was personified by the big glowing red eye.  The computer in the Axiom is a bad guy and has a big glowing red eye.  Coincidence?  

 

All of the coincidence set aside, Wall-E is fun to watch. Beautifully rendered on powerful computers, finely scored by Thomas Newman, it is more for adults than kids.  It pays homage from an overly sophisticated look at all the sci-fi films listed above.  Kids may miss all of that but they love the little guy from start to finish.  

 

There is almost no dialogue in Wall-E.  The first words are heard well into the 60-minute mark.  Little kids don’t laugh out loud till the 40-minute mark.  Until Wall-E and Eve end up aboard the Axiom there is not much action.  Then it becomes manic as if they are trying to catch up before it’s too late.  

 

The Axiom is a lot like the mother ship in the original Star Wars.  Coincidence?  

 

Like the other Pixar films this one has a great opening CG cartoon about a magician and his underfed white rabbit.  The white rabbit looks a lot like a white robot rabbit in a film whose title I can’t remember.  But I do know that Trix are for kids.  Coincidence?
 
Rated 3 out of 4 Robbie the Robots.