WALL-E is rated by many a film critic as Pixar’s best work till date. Pixar has established such a reputation with its groundbreaking behind-the-scenes work that one has almost come to take technical virtuosity in their movies for granted. Hence, suffice it to say, WALL-E doesn’t really surprise in that its 3-D animation is a visual delight. Nonetheless, it still managed to be exhilarating by slightly raising its already exalted standards. But what really interested me most was the level of maturity displayed. In fact, the first half-hour of the movie, which is sans any vocals, is, on one hand, a unique and enthralling visual poetry in motion, and on the other, a quietly disturbing view of a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future where the earth is filthy, desolate and uninhabitable. All we see is ‘Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class’, aka WALL-E, a Chaplinesque robot, quietly going about compacting garbage, and striving to preserve few moments of solace and serenity in its otherwise mundane existence. And then he (it) falls in love with an Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, resulting in some hilarious gags. Only when ‘humans’ come into the picture does the movie veer towards a cartoonish setting and a more traditional kind of storytelling, which is even heavy-handed at times, thus causing (quite regrettably) the initial brilliance and the ensuing wonderment to sag considerably.
Director: Andrew Stanton
Genre: Animation/Comedy/Satire/Sci-Fi/Adventure
Language: English
Country: US
