Ninth feature from Disney Pixar shows Earth abandoned, the consequences of not going green – 3 stars ***

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 6/28/08 – ‘WALL-E’ should win an Oscar, but is it entertainment? What if mankind left after transforming the Earth from a garden into an immense trash heap? That’s the depressing scenario explored by ‘WALL-E’, Disney Pixar’s latest film.

‘WALL-E’ is a cute trash compactor robot that beeps and whistles like R2-D2 from ‘Star Wars’. ‘WALL-E’ sound designer Ben Burtt was the voice of R2-D2 and many other legendary film robots. The film ‘WALL-E’ has very little dialog, is mostly sound effects and pantomime.

“This film is a mix of genres,” says producer Jim Morris. It’s a love story. It’s a science-fiction film. It’s a comedy. It’s a romantic comedy.” The film is full of cute moments, but this dark comedy is so dark that it’s more cautionary tale than comedy. The film’s biggest laugh is that ‘WALL-E’ boots as a Macintosh computer.

‘WALL-E’ is a nostalgic movie, and in the past was when it was conceived. The idea for “WALL-E” came about in 1994 at a legendary lunch that included Pixar pioneers Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and the late Joe Ranft. With their first feature, ‘Toy Story’, in production, the group was brainstorming ideas for future films. ‘A Bug’s Life’, ‘Monsters, Inc.’, ‘Finding Nemo’, and ‘WALL-E’ were discussed here first.

“One of the things I remember coming out of it was the idea of a little robot left on Earth,” says ‘WALL-E’ director and co-writer Andrew Stanton. “We had no story. It was sort of this Robinson Crusoe kind of little character. Like, what if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off, and he didn’t know he could stop doing what he’s doing?”

Stanton says he was heavily influenced by the sci-fi films of the 1970s. “Films like ‘2001,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘Blade Runner,’ and ‘Close Encounters’, they all had a look and feel to them that really transported me to another place. I really believed that those worlds were out there. I haven’t seen a movie since then that made me feel that same way when we went out to space, so I wanted to recapture that feeling.”

That ‘WALL-E’ was conceived at a time when the first word you think of after ‘global’ was not ‘warming’, makes the film darker today than it would have seemed fifteen years ago. In 1994, few people thought mankind could wreck the planet through negligence.

The cute robot WALL-E spends his days creating skyscrapers out of compacted recycling cubes, trying to clean up the mess left by humans who abandoned Earth 700 years ago. WALL-E pines for something better than his lonely existence, for a more embracable friend than his smart pet cockroach Hal. A sentimental robot, WALL-E’s hobbies are collecting human artifacts and watching ‘Hello Dolly’, which oddly is only available in the future on videotape. Efforts to hold back DVDs and digital downloads apparently finally succeeded.

WALL-E’s prayers are answered when EVE, a probe robot arrives. A sleek but cold-hearted beauty, she’s clearly out of WALL-E’s league. EVE sports an arm canon and a trigger-happy tendency to shoot anything that moves.

So where are all the people of Earth? A select group have found refuge on the Axiom, a luxury space cruiser that houses hundreds of thousands of people. For scale, it’s the size of Anaheim, California’s tenth largest city (population 334,425) and home to Disneyland. ‘WALL-E’ doesn’t show what happened to the rest of the billions of mankind, but obviously they’re all dead. Except for one cockroach, the animals are all gone, too.

The morbidly obese residents of AXIOM live their entire lives on hover chairs pampered by robots and virtually alone. Although on lounge chairs only a foot away from each other, these perpetual vacationers interact entirely by video halo phone.

Inspiration for the Axiom design came from researching luxury cruise ships, including those operated by Disney. “The original concept for the Axiom came from a cruise line,” says Production Designer Ralph Eggleston. “We designed a massive spaceship that is as big as a city, several miles long, and capable of holding hundreds of thousands of residents.”

“One of the biggest influences for me and everyone on the film in terms of creating our vision of the future was the art created for Tomorrowland,” says Eggleston. “You look at a lot of the space-program paintings of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and you see fantastic imagery of buildings on Mars. Somewhere around 1978, they stopped doing that, because they wouldn’t fund anything that they knew they couldn’t do. It wasn’t
about the specifics but rather the notion of ‘Where’s my jet pack?’”

“The whole look of ‘WALL-E’ is different from anything that’s been done in animation before,” says director of photography Jeremy Lasky. We really keyed in to some of the quintessential sci-fi films from the ’60s and ’70s as touchstones for how the film should feel and look.”

“We actually brought in some vintage 1970s Panavision cameras, similar to the ones used to shoot the original ‘Star Wars,’ and shot some imagery to get a sense of the kind of artifacts those lenses created,” says producer Jim Morris. “We observed technical things like chromatic aberration, barrel distortion and other imperfections and took what we learned and applied it to our computer-graphics photography.”

The original score for ‘WALL-E’ was composed by Thomas Newman, who had previously worked on ‘Finding Nemo’. Coincidentally, the score for ‘Hello, Dolly!’ was composed by Tom’s uncle, Lionel Newman. Peter Gabriel collaborated with Newman on an original song called “Down to Earth”, writing the lyrics and performing the song.

American cinema has become all about filmmaker “passion projects” that delight movie critics, but leave audiences cold. Filmmakers execute brilliantly, but impose such a dark unpleasant message that the audience wishes it could look away. After watching ‘WALL-E’, I felt depressed, not uplifted. ‘WALL-E’ is clever story-telling and remarkable animation with a dark underlying message.

Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.
Release Date: June 27th, 2008 (USA)
MPAA Rating: G
Distributors: Buena Vista