WALL•E is one of those rarities…

I must admit that I was sceptical of the film by what little I saw of it before I brought the DVD, a matter not helped with WALL•E reminding me a little too much of Johnny-5 from eighties film Short Circuit, still with Pixar’s heritage of film-making behind it, I grabbed the DVD* - and more recently the Blu-ray - as and when it was released, put the disc in my computer tray, turned the lights out and pressed “start movie” and waited for the obligatory company logos to play their course.

The first thing you hear is Michael Crawford’s wonderful voice singing “Out There”† from the sixties film Hello Dolly, it a heck of a way to start an animated sci-fi movie, a song about how there is always somewhere you can go in our beautiful world. It also fits in with the atmosphere of WALL•E, the juxtaposition between it and the world we see here works.

Taking about the music brings me to the rest of WALL•E’s sound, or at least one facet of it. While the film does have dialogue, for the first half-hour it might as well be a silent movie, WALL•E and E.V.E. speak their names and a few other words like “directive”, other than that the two make ‘robot’ sounds.

As such these two robots have to emote in the most primal way possible, through actual character animation, a rarity in today’s market of talky films; I was almost starting to think that it was a lost art. Body language is the order of the day here, and as someone who can animate as well as an animation fan, it’s welcomed with opened arms. And so well done is the character animation, that mere minutes into the movie I felt more for WALL•E than I have for any fictional character in a long while.

WALL•E himself is voiced, if that’s the right word, by Ben Burtt, who originally worked for LucasFilm’s sound effects department, starting off creating the effects for Star Wars, including the legendary noise of the Lightsaber; as well as providing the voices of some of the droids (like the one that gets tortured in Jabba’s palace). As a sound engineer, rather than a more traditional actor, he is perfect in the roll of, well a robot.

These two robots have managed to do what most robots tend to do in sci-fi, break their programming, or enough of it to develop quirks and personalities. WALL•E has taken up a hobby in the form of collecting any interesting knickknacks he finds, and it is charming to view his childlike fascination with what to us would be boring everyday items; it is also easy to emote with the care he treats his collection with. Even when we first meet E.V.E. we find that she isn’t fully committed to her job (or directive), having a jolly little joyride around the local area, it provides us with just enough knowledge that she seems to have

WALL•E was one of a number of WALL•E class robots meant to clean up the Earth, only something drastically wrong has happened and WALL•E is the only one who still functions, cannibalising other defunct WALL•E robots to survive. The opening is like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, it gives us a sense of the sheer isolation the robot has faced for the last few centuries.

And from the get-go it is obvious that he’s been doing this a very, very long time, as some trash is piled as high as the skyscrapers they stand next to. As the camera follows WALL•E we pass hypermarkets, banks, fast-food joints, all owned by a company called BnL, who apparently also managed to own the world’s government and set up the plans for the evacuation of the planet.

The opening also has the worse line in the movie, when the president of BnL – played by a live-action actor thanks to ILM – states that “…space is the final FUN-tier”, although it’s intentionally bad like a shamelessly bad catchphrase of an advertisement, so it couldn’t really be said to not serve its purpose.

Of course there’s the obvious parallel between WALL•E and the story of Noah’s Ark, with E.V.E. being the dove and all, but it’s the barebones of the story rather than the film having an overt agenda; besides its just kind of read that humanity would send out probe droids to find out if life had returned to their home-world in the far future.

The plot itself is straightforward and to the point, rather than overtly convoluted and needlessly twisty, not that it doesn’t have twists of its own, rather it works them into the narrative in a way that makes you believe that it couldn’t have happened any other way, it all makes logical sense. The simplicity of the film’s story aids it in another way, it is more or less impossible not to follow what is going on even though the pace of the film is for the most part extremely quick. Actually the pace is fine, really fine, the fast bits move fast and the more relaxed parts move at a more leisurely pace; but the pacing itself is so well thought out that I couldn’t believe that ninety minutes had past the first viewing. Sometimes I have complained about regular-length films that seem to go on forever, here the film just doesn’t feel long enough… it’s remarkable.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS - Highlight to read

The usual problem with a straightforward plot which speeds along at a fair pace is that plot holes can start to develop, and yes there are a few. One minor one is how the Axiom has survived and fed its populace over the centuries, although a throwaway line during a scene tells us that there is a food regeneration programme installed. However that is a minor issue when compared to the following, what happened to the rest of the BnL fleet; in the adverts we see at the beginning multiple ships are seen leaving the Earth along with the Axiom, and are never heard from or mentioned again. Just what happened to them (possible sequel-fodder maybe).

END SPOILERS

Then of course there’s the usual issue with Pixar’s – and most CGI film’s – “humans”, whose appearance I have a tendency to simply ignore because it’s a heck of a lot better than the film – and the studios – going down the treacherous road of uncanny valley.

However, when a film is as much fun and as heart-warming as WALL•E is, it is hard-to-impossible to let such issues bug you; and they don’t, it's like riding a rollercoaster and noticing that one or two of the ride’s animatronics are broken, it doesn’t detract from the actual ride. Calling WALL•E out on its flaws is almost nitpicking; the film's enjoyment factor just transcends it.