2008
DIRECTOR: ANDREW STANTON PRODUCER: JIM MORRIS SCREENPLAY: ANDREW STANTON AND JIM REARDON, BASED ON AN ORIGINAL STORY BY ANDREW STANTON AND PETE DOCTER STARRING: BEN BURTT (WALL-E/M-O/ROBOTS), ELISSA KNIGHT (EVE), JEFF GARLIN (CAPTAIN MCCREA), FRED WILLARD (SHELBY FORTHRIGHT), JOHN RATZENBERGER (JOHN), KATHY NAJIMY (MARY), SIGOURNEY WEAVER (SHIP’S COMPUTER)
WALL-E
PIXAR/WALT DISNEY • COLOR, 98 MINUTES
On an abandoned, ecologically destroyed Earth of the future, a janitorial robot falls in love with a high-tech probe droid.
Walt Disney subsidiary Pixar kicked off a winning streak of cream-of-the-crop animated features with Toy Story in 1995. After the overwhelming success of the studio’s Oscar-winning Finding Nemo in 2003, director Andrew Stanton decided to aim his talents at the genre of science fiction with WALL-E, an exquisitely rendered futuristic love story that touches on an array of topical themes without moralizing, allowing its engaging robotic characters to drive the vibrant, hope-filled plot forward.
WALL-E, who slightly resembles a mechanical E.T., is the last functioning Waste Allocation Load Lifter–Earth Class on the planet. He has a fondness for collecting junk, and for the movie musical Hello, Dolly! (1969) in the form of a sturdy Betamax tape that has survived for centuries. After 700 years of cleaning up the polluted Earth, WALL-E has developed enough sentience to ponder his lonely existence. In the words of director and cowriter Stanton, “If you’re doing the same thing day in and day out, year after year, at some point you have to just start asking the question, ‘Is there more to life than what I’m doing?’” Without uttering a word, WALL-E conveys a palpable melancholy, a sadness all the more touching because his character is not human, and not as aware of his tragic situation as we are as we watch him stack his neatly compacted squares of rubbish into towering skyscrapers. When each day’s work is done, he feeds his pet cockroach a Twinkie, folds down into a box, and rocks himself to sleep.
Stanton, who came up with the premise, first began developing the project in 1994 under the title Trash Planet. What eventually emerged was a dystopic romance starring two polar opposites. WALL-E, as executive producer John Lasseter explained, “is ground-based. He is heavy. He’s this dirty little bulldozer. Then here’s this light, beautiful, airy angel. They are from two worlds.” Two worlds collide when the slick, egg-shaped EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) probe is sent to WALL-E’s city from the Axiom ship in deep space, where the evacuated human race lives in cruise-ship comfort. WALL-E has only seen broken-down remnants of the planet’s former glory until he lays eyes on this gliding, hovering fembot, designed by Pixar’s animators to be everything that WALL-E is not: WALL-E is a square (a traditionally masculine shape) from the rocky, dusty, unpredictable Earth, and EVE is a feminine circle from a polished, ultra-hygienic, fully automated spaceship. When the two meet, as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the irrational force of love conquers science and technology. Despite what computer programs compel the robots to do, their feelings are strong enough to override the systems.
WALL-E discovers a Rubik’s Cube.
The scene where WALL-E and EVE float in deep space is akin to a mini–dance number, he advancing toward her by spraying a fire extinguisher, she zooming, circling back, until at last they meet and kiss, then crisscross among the stars in a wordless expression of joy. In addition to their feelings for each other, WALL-E and EVE discover a ray of hope for the barren Earth—a single little plant growing in an old boot.
WALL-E is a rarity: a feature-length film with a main character who doesn’t speak. (The filmmakers watched practically every silent film Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made while plotting the tale.) WALL-E’s minimal noises—and most other sounds in the film—are courtesy of Ben Burtt, the man who created R2-D2’s tones for the Star Wars trilogy. “One of the things I loved most about Star Wars was R2-D2 and how much personality this little robot had, without a face and with just sounds,” John Lasseter said. “It was so appealing. It reinforced my feeling that great animation, great characters, don’t necessarily come from the dialogue or the voice alone.” The charming bleeps are enriched with splashy, nostalgic songs from Hello, Dolly! and a note-perfect original score from Thomas Newman. The film also contains shadows of Silent Running (1972) and direct nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Alien franchise (with Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the Axiom’s computer).
M-O (the Microbe-Obliterator) attempts to clean WALL-E
AUTO, Captain McCrea, and EVE aboard the Axiom
Punctuating the romance, music, and sci-fi references are nibbles of biting satire. WALL-E takes subtle jabs at technology, consumerism, pollution, obesity, and corporate domination, but rarely has a film with so many layers of social critique been so easy to digest. There’s no cruelty in its criticism; rather, it treats all its characters—down to the tiniest cockroach—with love and respect. “To be honest,” Stanton later revealed, “I didn’t have any agenda.” His observations about the future of humanity, whether flattering or not, are inherent to the story, not forced upon the audience as moral messages. Audiences ate it up. The film was an enormous hit, and won a Golden Globe, a Saturn, a Hugo, and an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
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