WALL.E (U) Star rating: **** Dir: Andrew Stanton Voices: Ben Burtt, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver HAVING made a rat in the kitchen a thing of beauty in last year's Ratatouille, Pixar once again leaves every other animation studio in the dust with a lump of metal that will bring a lump to your throat. The dark, brooding, and sumptuous WALL.E, the tale of the last being left on Earth, is the story writer-director Andrew Stanton has been longing to make for more than a decade. The wait has been worth it.
That said, like the bad fairy at the christening of a new animated icon, I feel the need to issue a word of caution to those taking very young cinema-goers along. WALL.E initially covers some difficult, gloomy terrain. With minimal dialogue and a multi-layered story this is a film that's more at home on Stanley Kubrick Avenue than Sesame Street. It may take a while to settle into, and Stanton's tale might sometimes overreach itself, but a trip to WALL.E's world is one all ages should be able to marvel over.
Stanton sets the edgy tone in the opening minutes with, of all things, a jaunty tune from Hello, Dolly! As Put On Your Sunday Clothes strides out, the camera executes what seems at first sight to be the usual panoramic sweep of Manhattan. A closer look reveals the skyscrapers to be less cathedrals of glass and steel and more towers of rotting litter. Some 800 years from now (that long?), mankind has fulfilled its consumer destiny by burying the Earth in rubbish, fleeing into space and leaving robots behind to clean up.
It has been a task too far for all but one of the androids. WALL.E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth class) is the last robot standing. A cross between R2-D2, ET and bomb disposal machine, the bundle of nuts and bolts with a heart is alone, his only friend a cockroach, his only contact with the world that used to be an old videotape of Hello, Dolly!
Observing WALL.E go about his lonely business by day and rock himself to sleep at night is bleak, heartbreaking stuff. Like all of Disney's greatest characters, WALL.E is a doe-eyed orphan, a character designed to claw at the emotions with the efficiency of an industrial digger. He is Bambi left alone without his mother; Dumbo being teased to tears. He is crying out for company and comfort, but no-one is there. Or so it seems.
Out of a black-red polluted sky a spaceship appears, leaving a robot of its own behind. Eve (Extra- Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is a sleek, snow white, blue-eyed calculating machine with a mean trigger finger. When she and WALL.E meet it's love at first byte for him, War of the Worlds for her. Can the path of true love ever run smooth for these two tin cans? If it does, where in the sorry tip that is Earth will they build an Eden?
Watching Eve and WALL.E get to know each other is another chance to hear the genius of Ben Burtt at work. The sound designer who brought ET, R2-D2, and Chewbacca to vocal life can convey more emotion with squeaks and beeps than your average screenwriter manages in 10 pages of dialogue.
Stanton relies on stunning visuals and silent comedy to move the story along and keep the audience hooked. There isn't enough of either in the long middle section, which is set on a cruise ship in space. Jeff Garlin (Larry David's long-suffering manager in Curb Your Enthusiasm) plays the captain who, after way too much ado, gets the message about looking after Mother Nature if she is to look after us. Although well-intentioned, this segment adds a preachy, intrusive note into what has been up to this point a dreamy, other-worldly movie.
To give Stanton his due, his depressing vision of the future, complete with humans so fat they can no longer walk, will probably be a more effective wake-up call than Al Snore and his slides ever were. And it was a very cute touch to have Sigourney Weaver, little Ms Ripley herself, voice the ship's computer.
Although the green message is one worth sending out, you can have too much apocalyptic vision. Today's audiences, adults especially, are in the mood for a little hope with their escapism. While Stanton provides lots of the latter, he hesitates for some time before supplying the former. Just when a worrying chill has set in, the emotional thermostat is turned up and a closing section comes along that hits you exactly where it should: not in the old grey matter, but the heart. Once again, it's a song from Hello, Dolly! that seals the deal. If your bottom lip is not trembling at this point, your soul has surely rusted.
Bold, stunning, awesome, and light years ahead of everyone else - thank heaven and all the galaxies for Pixar.
