Ever wondered what would happen if E.T had a threesome with Short Circuit and Robots? Well, cease your wondering, because WALL- E is here.
Set 800 years in the future, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last robot left on earth, doggedly cleaning up the waste the humans left behind when they fled to space.
Despite the obvious message, this film manages to stop short of beating audiences round the head with the ethical nunchucks.
The latest film from Academy Award-winning director/writer Andrew Stanton, Disney-Pixar’s WALL-E is actually a love story. Going about his work day after day, WALL-E is lonely. That is until EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) comes along, searching for signs of life on earth. After 800 years of communing with a cockroach called Hall, WALL-E falls in love with sleek and hi-tech EVE, beginning an adventure which makes him the inadvertent saviour of humanity.
From the team that gave us Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Ratatouille, expectations were always going to be high, but WALL-E goes beyond anything we have ever seen before. There is almost no dialogue as EVE and WALL-E cannot speak. However Stanton manages to side-step the ‘E.T phone home’ moments through the quality of the animation and the pervasiveness of the film’s musical score.
Sifting through tons of human junk, WALL-E has amassed an Aladdin’s cave of treasured items, one of which is an old video of Hello Dolly. Throughout the film, WALL-E aspires to one thing – to hold hands like the characters from the film he replays over and over. The song Put On Your Sunday Clothes therefore informs not only the musical, but the thematic elements of WALL-E, providing some of the most comic and heart-warming moments of the film.
As you may have already gathered, we loved this film. Stanton and his team have created a world in which the robots are human and the humans are robots. The crisis of categorisation evidenced in WALL-E by his finding a spork (is it a spoon or is it a fork? Spoon? Fork? It can’t be both!) is just one of many examples in which this film, despite its sci-fi theme, remains remarkably real throughout.
It is Robinson Crusoe meets Transformers, with a few obese humans thrown in for good measure. Oh, and Signourney Weaver is the sexy voice of the spaceship, proving that this film has something for all the family!
[story by Amy Grier]