Wendell and WALL-E
It looks like living on Eastern time and having children of a matinee-going age makes me among the first of us to have seen WALL-E. I don’t intend to write a review, but I will say that the nearly wordless first act is marvelous, and I was relieved to see a kids’ movie in which the obligatory message of ecological apocalypse is framed in terms of jeopardizing our own humanity, rather than being mean to poor Gaia.
Just got back from my own viewing, and I agree, it’s fabulous. Not quite in the league of Ratatouille and The Incredibles, but very close, which means it’s better than any animated film you’ll see at least until the next Pixar release. And the preceding short, “Presto,” is brilliant: Loony Tunes reborn.
Side note: as a long-time Mac guy, I love it that WALL-E’s iPod is still working, at least seven hundred years after its manufacture, and that his love interest, Eve, is clearly running a version of the MAc OS (you can tell by the startup chime).
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 27, 10:11 PM · #
WALL-E made the old Mac startup chime when his batteries were fully charged.
— Matt Frost · Jun 27, 10:20 PM · #
The first act really was incredible. (And I seem to remember some skeptics over the last year who didn’t think kids would sit still for a silent movie. At least at the matinee we caught, kids loved it.)
Plus, it had a highly enjoyable self-righteousness about the need to switch off the screens and move around. Good stuff!
— Jason B. Jones · Jun 27, 10:31 PM · #
I saw it yesterday with my girlfriend, and I’m still ecstatic.
Some things that jumped out:
1. The economy of words in the telling of the love story. Eve basically says nothing but “Wallee”, and Wall-E only says “Eve-eh”, and yet somehow what’s communicated is a rich, complex tapestry of emotions. Focusing on Eve, from that one word she communicates acquaintance, friendship, surprise, annoyance, exasperation, motherly protection, appreciation, innocent delight, romantic intimacy, unfathomable loss — the list goes on and on. That all this could come from a faceless robot is something of a cinematic miracle. It reminds me of David Milch and how he decided to write Woo’s part in Deadwood; how Woo communicated so much with the one English word he knew, “cocksucker”, just by tone, timing and the circumstance in which it was uttered. I walked out of Wall-E‘s one-word emotional symphony enchanted by its simple majesty, thrilled to an appreciation of all the unspoken ways we communicate to each other, communicate, not just thoughts, but the deepest depths of our souls.
2. The wind whistling through a broken, wrecked, uninhabited future. It reminded me of the extended prologue of Kubrick’s 2001; it sounded like . . . emptiness. A haunting, dreadful, spiritual emptiness.
3. Eve’s laughter at Wall-E’s clumsy efforts of courtship; it captured perfectly the sound of innocent, feminine delight — perhaps the best sound in the universe — and proving yet again that the best way to win a woman’s heart is to make her laugh.
I could go on, of course. And on, and on, and on…
— JA · Jun 29, 06:49 PM · #