WALL-E

A brilliant 30 minutes that's overexpanded into a full-length feature. But still amusing most of the time.

From the Criterion website. I gave them LOTS of money in the old LaserDisc days! Fair use.

WALL-E (2008). Grade: B

Because my dad was a mean jerk, I get very emotional about computer-animated movies.

Let me back that up for a second. My dad was a mean jerk who made fun of us kids for being attached to toys. If we were crying because a toy broke, he’d mock us.

So naturally, decades later, I bawled my eyes out at the Toy Story movies. (Not the last one.) And then at a lot of the subsequent Pixars, too. And some computer-animated movies by other studios.

I don’t know if that’s rational. Of course crying at a movie is rational, but it should be at good movies. If you caught me crying to He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, you’d be well within your rights to declare me insane.

(I literally typed into a search engine the dumbest cartoon idea I could think of, and it actually exists. He-Man was a terrible, cheaply-animated cartoon in the 1980s, designed to sell the corresponding action figures. It was Conan meets A Boy and His Dog, or something to that effect, and had “moral lessons” tacked onto the end of every episode. I didn’t know there was a Christmas special, though. Isn’t learning fun?)¹

Are the Pixars good movies? I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever watched one more than once. Except The Incredibles, which I own, and didn’t cry at; I can enjoy the great Ken Adam-style design and the witty script without being emotionally manipulated.

That’s not to say the other Pixars are manipulative! Just that many movies I’ve reacted to emotionally in the past do seem manipulative to me today.

So, my library tells me whenever they buy a new Criterion disc; and last year they bought WALL-E. Even when I don’t like the movies on Criterion, I usually like the essays that come with them. (In this case, maybe comparing WALL-E to Samuel Beckett, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, was a little much?)

I figured, I’ll try one of the Pixars that made me cry. Why not? Well, WALL-E didn’t make my cry this time. I still enjoyed most of it.

The opening scenes, set on a future, garbage-strewn Earth, are very strong. They look good, and they should; master cinematographer Roger Deakins was consulted for how to give the “photography” more depth and realism. The movie’s original working title was Trash Planet; the idea was “when we left Earth, somebody forgot to turn the last robot off.”

It looks mightily grim, despite a lot of clever visual gags. Watching little robot WALL-E roam around cheerfully, compacting trash into stackable cubes, but collecting his favorite bits of junk to keep, made me think of what I’d probably do if I had to pick up trash, forever and ever. I’d keep the bits I thought were fun.

Then it made me think, “oh no! What if even by thinking this, a mind-reading omniscient deity, incensed by my agnosticism, decided to punish me by making an afterlife where I sort through trash, forever and ever?” It’s not likely, but it isn’t impossible. That got me thinking about mortality, which as a 52-year-old with very tenuous access to health insurance, I already think about a great deal, anyways.

Then I started thinking about Katharine Boo’s nonfiction Behind The Beautiful Forevers, about the parts where children have to sort through piles of trash in order to live — now, today — and I worried less about my afterlife circumstances.

Although, there are hints of mortality in WALL-E, too; the robot passes several olden, broken models that look like itself. So it cheerfully cannibalizes them for parts.

(Which is good, because as I saw the dusty, rusty, dented WALL-E, I became worried that the robot would break; kicking in my childhood feelings about broken toys. And of course that itself is influenced by old stories I knew, like The Velveteen Rabbit and Pinocchio.)

Soon enough, another, newer robot appears. It’s called EVE, for biblical reasons. Except this version uses a giant laser cannon all the time, and there aren’t any talking snakes. WALL-E’s fascination with, fear of, and goofy courtship towards EVE is really charming. (Every time WALL-E is timid and/or disappointed, it’s always really charming.) Then the two of them get whisked into space. Most of the rest of the movie takes place on futuristic spaceships.

It’s at this point where the story starts to meander. It doesn’t lose your interest completely — there’s enough humor for it not to — but it feels stretched. Like this could have been a really close to perfect 30 or 45-minute film, but it needed to be 97 minutes to justify the nearly $200 million spent on the thing.

And while the stuff aboard the spaceship certainly looks amazing and is full of intricate detail, it’s not as evocative as the Trash Planet material. Which might have been a conscious choice to spare the audience; this is a movie meant for families to enjoy, and the Trash Planet is quite depressing to look at.

All the same, when I thought this was getting ready to wrap up, I checked the display and there was over 30 minutes left! At least it’s sometimes quite funny.

There’s a new robot, even littler than WALL-E, who has almost the same endless job; it’s constantly scrubbing and buffing away dirt. It’s cutely peeved at the very dirty WALL-E leaving tracks and rust flakes all over. Later its stubbornness turns out to be useful.

And when EVE comes to after being thrown by baddies into a trash chute, it wakes up to shake away the mice crawling all over — which are actual computer mice.

Still, there’s a little too much forced action for my taste — is that because Pixar movies always had an action climax? (Which again, is most watchable when it’s funny.) And there’s a few sequences that shoot for lyrical beauty and, to me, don’t get there. (This was the case in director Andrew Stanton’s previous feature, too, Finding Nemo — I thought it was an impressive technical achievement with a meager story.)

There’s also something of a problem with the implied social criticism of the film. The spaceship where most of the movie takes place is a giant luxury liner, where humans have gone to escape Earth’s pollution. On board the starliner, all humans are plugged constantly into screens, and ride around on auto-steering hover-recliners. Their constant wishes for more snack food are immediately served by speedy robot waiters. As a consequence, they have all atrophied into chubby, rubbery blobs.

The implication seems to be that fast food, snack food, omnipresent screens and using virtual interactions over real ones is mostly the product of our laziness. There is a giant, all-controlling corporation in charge of everything, a sort of mingle of Wal-Mart and Amazon and every Sandals resort commercial; its historic founder/world emperor is played by Fred Willard in archival footage. (He’s funnily smarmy as always — and to date, the only actor with a live-action role in a Pixar film.)

But as we all become more reliant on technology today, with all the negative things that implies, is it because we chose it? Or because it was basically shoved down our throats?

Most people enjoy certain modern technological conveniences — except when they don’t work. And with the monopolistic, anti-regulatory “market capture” model used by our World Emperors, there is absolutely no reason for them to improve the quality and reliability of technological services we depend upon. If anything, it’s to make them more vulnerable to breakdown. Only the richest users will be assured of uninterrupted service. The rest of us will just keep feeding personal information to systems designed solely to monetize that information.

If that sounds like I’m demanding a little too much from a kids’ film — that’s fair! But consider when this was made. It was released in 2008. The first iPhone came out in 2007. And Pixar had Apple as a majority shareholder until 2006. (In 2006 Disney acquired it, and Disney is VERY MUCH in the addictive-screen-content business; the luxury cruise and resort business, too.)

Early on, we see an ancient iPod; it’s how WALL-E watches his favorite movie over and over.* When WALL-E powers up after a solar recharge, we hear the old Mac startup sound. This was amusingly used in the Futurama episode “Fear Of A Bot Planet”; when human-hating robots begin their daily Human Hunt, heralds blow horns — and the Mac startup sound comes out.

In WALL-E, I’m sure, the Apple references are a gesture of love towards the company’s biggest financial benefactor. But it’s right at this time that iPhones were beginning the process of making us all addicted to and reliant upon screens, all the time. And corporations using this addiction to make us dependent on their devices, giving them ever-greater power.

In that light, the “social criticism” so critically-praised in this film feels mightily thin; it feels like healthy, wealthy Bay Area types poking fun at those of us who don’t jog more.

(Pixar is in the Bay Area, although I don’t know how much jogging they do! This fun article is about how frequently visual inspirations from the Bay Area find their way into Pixar films. WALL-E’s eyes were inspired by binoculars Stanton was handed while watching an Oakland A’s game — I’m guessing he was sitting in Mount Davis.)

How’s the supplemental Criterion material here? It’s fine. If you’re a huge fan of the film, it’s probably a must! All of these films have hundreds or thousands of brilliant technicians and talented artists involved; their work is interesting. (Legendary sound wizard Ben Burtt did more work here than he did on any of the Star Wars movies!) The booklet has cool design drawings and sample script/concept pages.

This edition also comes with both a Blu-Ray and 4KUHD transfer — which is silly! Unless you’re sitting way too close to a way-too-large TV, you’ll never notice the difference. And Blu-Rays are easier to scratch beyond repair than standard DVDs; 4KUHD might be the same. One standard DVD and one Blu-Ray would have been better.

Bottom line? I didn’t revere this the way I did when it came out. But it’s almost never dull to watch, and the opening is terrific. And hey — maybe it taught a generation of viewers not to litter. And that’s not a bad thing!

* — At one point, WALL-E pops his favorite VHS tape into a player, and watches it on an iPod.

Ladies, gents, and robots, that’s not a thing that's conventionally possible to do. I have a bucket of old adapters for equipment even antique obsessives wouldn't want. (Because “someday I might need one of these…”). I could, if I had to, play a DVD on an old TV. Like this!

But VHS to iPod? That’s not something you would find lying around. Even if Radio Shacks were still open.²

1. There was also a live-action He-Man movie, with Dolph Lundgren and… Frank Langella? I almost want to see Frank Langella in this.

2. A friend of mine was convinced that Radio Shacks were C.I.A. fronts. Because they asked you for your ZIP code when you bought anything. If so, thanks, C.I.A., those speakers I bought in 2001 still work great!