Originally posted at the DL January 2011
The Best Pixar Movie.
Okay so, way back in Inside Out, I noted that "feels like Pixar" included '- Uplifting humanist messaging without talking down to the audience.' That was always meant first and foremost in reference to Wall-E. In particular, the scene where Wall-E meets Mary. She's babbling away over her headset to some unidentified person about bad dates, and desperate to get past her, Wall-E turns her chair off when she fails to respond to anything else. Her first reaction is... utter awe and really seeing the Axiom and the world around her, quite possibly for the first time in her life. If you want a visualization of Pixar and what they believe in, those three or four seconds are hard to beat.
So the visual brilliance of the movie is pretty obvious. They spent a lot of time creating what I'm pretty sure are the ruins of New York, complete with a completely drained harbor, and the design of the Axiom tech, and the detailing of Wall-E's bunker and giant stacks of trash and etc. 'Define Dancing' is one of the more iconic moments of the entire 2000s. It's interesting to me that they went out on a limb like this, considering their previous work was very talky and focused on character building through direct dialog. But hey, they pulled it off.
The really fantastic part though is we have a movie that is so blunt about its themes people actually started finding extra ones because they had to use other overt themes to get across their original overt themes, I never felt like they were sacrificing the integrity of the movie to do it. Knocking people out of their complacency feels natural to Wall-E as a character. The relationship between EVE and Wall-E makes sense. The Captain's lethargy in the beginning sells me on his declaration of "I don't want to survive, I want to LIVE".
And hey. Basically the entire main cast are a pack of dorks. Wall-E is a collector, EVE is a wanna be action heroine, the Captain does an on-screen wiki-walk. So I think they may have had a damn good idea of their target audience, y'know.
Rating- 9/10
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