WALL-E (2008)

 

100 Best Science Fiction Movies from Slant Magazine

 

#74. WALL-E (2008)

 

“Most sci-fi doesn't deal with how humanity has gone to a happy place. Most sci-fi deals--directly or indirectly--with some misdirection or misstep with mankind or society.”

--- co-Writer and Director Andrew Stanton

 

A wholly unexpected and thoroughly triumphant movie, this was a Children’s Film that never talked down to the kids, in fact treated them as intelligent and thinking beings the way most blockbusters refuse to treat adults. It was rewarded not only with financial success but has since been showered with almost every possible accolade including six Oscar nominations (one win) and landing on multiple lists of the best Animated, Children’s, and SF film ever made.

 

Sweetly funny, it couldn’t have stood on darker foundations if it tried. Half of it is set on the Far-Future, Ruined Earth that is quite literally a garbage dump, and half on a Generation Star Ship that could’ve easily doubled for the Underground Dystopias of E. M. Forester’s novella, “When the Machine Stops” (1909) or George Lucas’ film, “THX-1138 (1971).

 

Humans chose to abandon Earth rather than curb their appetites and now reside on the Star Ship Axiom, waiting for the Planet to recover on its own. The Star Ship’s design was based on luxury Cruise Ships and the most expensive Hotel in Dubai. Humanity’s over-dependance on Robotic Room Service has led to De-Evolution and (as Production Designer Ralph Eggelston put it), “humans have reverted into slovenly big babies.”

 

Earth’s final Guardian is the Sanitation Robot WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class and voiced by Sound-Editor Ben Burtt, who fed himself through an electronic filter). He endlessly preforms simple pre-programed tasks even though his AI is far more sophisticated than that. He passes an electronic billboard that explains, “Too much garbage in your place? There is plenty of space out in space! BNL StarLiners leaving each day. We'll clean up the mess while you're away.” But WALL-E has been compacting and organizing the trash into tidy mountains for 700 years and the landscape of unaddressed waste remains overwhelming.

 

He’s the last on his kind, and among the trash that surrounds him are similar Robots that have long-ceased functioning. His only friend is a cockroach and his only sense of what Humanity once was is specific pieces of debris he scavenges and decorates his hovel with (he especially likes videos of Musical Comedies). This is a Satire on Consumerism and the Culture of Disposability it encourages, but the Producers didn’t hold back on the Product Placement, especially Apple Products.

 

WALL-E gets only limited dialogue, and the first voice heard is in the opening credits, the song, “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from the film “Hello Dolly” (1969), then there’s an Infomercial narration that gives us essential background, but actual dialogue does not appear for the first thirty-three minutes. Instead, WALL-E proves beautifully expressive through mime and evocative electronic bleeps. WALL-E maybe the greatest of all film Robots, easily the greatest cute one. In “Star Wars” (1976) R2-D2 was a landmark, but a mere foil as the Human Actors carried the film. WALL-E is the center of all action and story-telling and doesn’t need a CP3O to translate for him.

 

According to co-Writer and Director Stanton the script was written with conventional dialogue that the filmmakers knew they were going to dispose of. When satisfied with the story, they went back a line-by-line asked themselves how the same could be expressed without words. Their guides were the Silent-era Comedies and wordless animated shorts of Chuck Jones. Said Stratton, “We watched a [Charlie] Chaplin film and a [Buster] Keaton film and sometimes a Harold Lloyd film every day at lunch for almost a year and a half, the story crew and the animation crew.”

 

When Wall-E encounters a second Robot, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator and voiced Elissa Knight) from the Axiom, he falls in love. Courting “her” (though they’re Robots, they are clearly meant to be seen as male and female) WALL-E shows EVE a solitary plant he has discovered among the ruins, and EVE returns to Axiom, with WALL-E tagging along, to report the vital news that Earth is becoming habitable again.

 

The two Robots don’t get the reception they expected because Axiom’s Main Computer has gone a bit nutty (voiced by Sigourney Weaver, an in-joke referring to the Evil Main Computer Mother from Weaver’s break-through film “Alien” (1979)).

 

To save the Future, WALL-E must be brave, EVE must rally the broken Robots the Star Ship that are worn-out from caring for lazy Humans, and even more improbably, Mankind must learn to act like Men again, which involves the Herculean task of the morbidly obese rising out of a reclining-chairs.

 

The Trope of Robots displaying more Human virtues than Humans is common enough, but here it’s sharpened, because in the Human’s embrace of passivity, they’ve also learned to love less while WALL-E and EVE were that year’s greatest Love Story. OK, wasn’t that hard, it was also the year of “Twilight” and “The Love Guru,” but it was also almost any year’s greatest Love Story. There’s one very quick and adorable image that tells it all. WALL-E and EVE have saved the day and are holding hands. A lazar cuts a message into a garbage mountain, a heart, with an arrow going through it, and their initials, “WE.”

 

Stanton, “All I cared about was making these two robots fall in love. But I knew that I wanted it on the backdrop of humanity, and I knew that I wanted the byproduct of them falling in love to improve the world or improve the universe.” The two main Human Characters, John (John Ratzenberger) and Mary (Kathy Najimy), who are quite intentionally less-interesting than the Robots, are inspired by the Robots to rediscover Romance. “The theme for me was, a rational love defeats life's programming. It takes a random act of love or kindness to break you out of your routine or your rut, and you literally have these two main characters who are programmed.” He was referring to the Robots, but the statement applies equally to the Humans.

 

From its first color animation, “Flowers and Trees” (1932), Disney has shown a painterly devotion to light. The illusion of Lighting Design was often stunningly convincing, but hand-drawn animations have inevitable limitations on that count. On the other hand, CGI animations create a full-3D landscape for its Characters to inhabit, even though that space is no more real than any other binary code.

 

One of the things the Animators said was that there was no huge technological leaps-forward in any of the animation technology, only that they were getting better-and-better with the well-worn, but still pretty new, tools.

 

CGI allowed Production Designer Eggleston to be more a conventional in that role than almost any Animator in the century before him, and his work with Lighting Artists who had no lamps (this film had at least three) was more akin to that in live-stage and live-action cinema than any animated film proceeding Pixar’s first feature, “Toy Story” (1995). Eggleston was also a Screenwriter (though not credited as such on this film) and he a keen sense of how visual storytelling should properly be called “storytelling visually”; in an interview he said, “As any of the great production designers would tell you, ‘Start from the character and then everything else will follow;’ and it’s so true.”

 

Color symbolism was key. A comedy generally benefits from bright colors but the first half of the film was set in a Wasteland, so the decision was to accent the rust and grime with colors that pop, like bright yellow paint on WALL-E, which made him look more utilitarian, like a tractor-truck. The Animators certain colors a lot, others barely at all, and there’s almost no greens on the Ruined Earth until the solitary green plant is revealed.

 

 Stanton is a fan of the SF films of the 1970s, and several are obviously referenced. “WALL-E” carries over the Environmental themes of “Silent Running” (1972) and WALL-E’s own, purely function design, not emulating Human forms and being all-but faceless, was influenced by that “Silent Running’s” Robots Huey, Dewy, and Lewy, who also inspired R2D2.

 

Stratton, "His [WALL-E’s] eyes and hand positions are all based on dramatic context. He sees dancing on TV and then mimics it, and it grows from there. If ever there was a gag that didn't work, it would really pull you out of the movie. If you jiggle the tread a certain way, it would remind the audience that he was a machine, whereas the acting would be more anthropomorphic. It was always a balance between machine movement and vaudevillian acting like Fozzie Bear.” WALL-E mostly moves with precise 90* turns.

 

Once aboard the Axiom, the visual aesthetic and color pallet changes. The over-abundance of white and curving walls in the affluent Dystopia of Axiom was an aesthetic that emerged with films like “THX-1138” and “The Andromeda Strain” (both 1971) though, as it is as much a Leisure Cruise Liner as it is a Starship, it’s not nearly so harsh. And the over-abundance of white, and the movement away from right-angles, can be seen in EVE.

 

"EVE was the antithesis in design and emotion to WALL-E in every way ... She is very elegant and is all circles and ovals, and he is a bunch of boxes and hard edges. Likewise, her movement is based on figure eights and arcs and his is on right angles and unrefined movements. She is a combination of porpoise meets wind chime... lots of undulated movements."

 

This was a Pixar/Disney co-production, and strongly bears the stamp of both Houses. Disney was the World’s giant in family entertainment, specifically animation, since created the first feature-length animated film in 1937 with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It has also had its ups-and-downs over the following eight-plus decades, and without doubt Pixar saved them when they merged shortly after Pixar’s inception in 1992.

 

Pixar’s creative philosophy was stopping the buck at its Director, meaning he has final say over both Pixar and Disney Producers. This gives each film a distinctive stamp, and as they prefer to recruit-from-within, establishing creative continuities as the torch is handed from one Director to the next. In this case, Stanton was Mentored John Lassiter who Directed “Toy Story” where Stanton worked as a Writer. Then Stratton served as assistant-Director on Lassiter’s “A Bug’s Life” (1998). Then Stanton co-Wrote and Directed “Finding Nemo” (2003).

 

But Pixar Projects also evolve out of the moral and social values that Disney has proudly propagandized in favor of since its inception in 1924 and several of Animators grew up with Disney extolling long-standing traditions of “romantic devotion and monogamy … hard work, faithfulness to duty” and denigrating “passive dependency.”

 

As I write this, Disney is up-to-its-eyeballs in a trivial but financially-damaging Culture-War declared on them by hyper-Partisan, sorta-Conservatives, but one can’t ignore, Disney has been our media’s greatest articulator the self-defined values of the USA, comparable only to Director Frank Capra; and since it’s a studio not a merely mortal man, Disney presented these ideals both before Capra began his Professional career and long after his death. Certainly, it has always been the USA’s greatest fountain of Conservative ideals.

 

This film’s unsubtle Environmentalist Themes never ran awful with Conservatives because it never uttered the dirty words, “Climate Change” or “Global Warming.” This earned them gushing praise from those they were, in fact, challenging, Conservative Commentator Charlotte Allen wrote, “The crime of how humans vacate Earth isn’t failure to drive a Prius but strewing detritus. Conservatives detest litterbugs and other parasites who expect others to clean up after them. ‘WALL-E’ champions hard work, faithfulness to duty and the fact that even a dreary job like garbage-collecting can be meaningful and fulfilling … [the film] isn’t denigrating consumerism but passive dependency ... [and] celebrates Western civilization.”

 

True, to a point. The film focused on “gluttony” and “sloth” numbers two and four on the list of the Seven Deadly Sins, but more so on “waste” which I guess counts as either number eight or nine of the Seven. To be wholly truthful, our ideological conflicts are generally rooted in values shared by both sides and Disney understands the “shared” part better than most engaged in the battles. That there is conflict is often born of ignorance, hypocrisy, and deliberate deceit, the disguising the core-beliefs of the opponent that almost no human on this Planet denies. The Conservative magazine, “Movieguide” was quite right when they stated “WALL-E” had, “strong Christian worldview without mentioning Jesus that tells a story about no greater love has any person than to give up his or her life for his or her neighbor.” My only possible complaint about that statement is it forgot mention the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Secular Humanists, and basically everybody else.

 

Trailer:

WALL-E (2008) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers - YouTube