27th September, 2008

DAVID ADAMS

WALL•E (G)

In A Word: Enchanting

It’s a love story but by no means conventional. Centred on an eccentric robot named WALL•E, the Disney/Pixar film of the same name is a beautifully structured film which rates among their best, bringing to life a wonderful story about love and hope as well as packing a punch at our consumerist culture.

WALL•E is a robot left to help clean up the world after it became so filled with trash that humans decided to leave for five years while robots like WALL•E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) were left behind to do their dirty work.

But that was 700 years ago and WALL•E is now the last of his kind, left alone on earth to continue his endless task. He’s developed a personality in that time and it’s hard not to be charmed by this robot with an insatiable curiosity and odd behaviour, including his habit of collecting items that catch his eye along with his friendship with a cockroach and his penchant for watching the film Hello Dolly at the end of each day. Not to mention his seemingly incurable loneliness.

Yet WALL•E’s world is turned upside down when a mysterious sleek stranger arrives in a vast ship one day. ‘EVE’ (or Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) turns out to be a robot probe, sent to earth by humans still living in space to see whether the earth is yet again habitable. But for WALL•E, EVE is so much more. He falls in love with EVE and becomes distraught when the ship which left her comes back to take her away again.

Hitching a ride, WALL•E’s taken across the universe on a journey to her home and there finds the sinister answer to why the now hefty humans have not returned to earth after 700 years. Aided by EVE and an odd collection of robots, he sets about putting things right.

For a film which features rather less than the usual amount of talking, WALL•E manages to communicate a lot, often simply through the expressive face of the star himself (and yes, as others have pointed out, he does seem to bear some considerable resemblance to both ET and the robot who starred in 1980s Short Circuit films. There are also some references made here to other science-fiction films, including 2001 - remember the all-powerful computer HAL?).

Directed by Finding Nemo’s Andrew Stanton, WALL•E will enchant both adults and children alike and, as well as humour and plenty of heart, has some great messages about waste, consumerism and our responsibility to care for the future of our planet without being as heavy-handed as recent films like Happy Feet.

A beautifully crafted film in terms of both its animation and storyline, WALL•E is one not to miss.

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