'WALL-E': Brilliance Was Once Your Art

Seeing the trailer to Pixar’s newest film, my jadedness told me this was an extended R2-D2 feature, a cute harmless voyage.

Seeing the first 10 minutes of Pixar’s newest film, I forgot my jadedness. Lap dissolves reveal wasted land and places people once called home, evoking the technique and tone of John Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath.” A computer animated film with an opening on par with American cinema’s finest. This might be the one that transcends “Toy Story.”

WALL-E is the titular protagonist. His name is appropriately a forced acronym given our society’s current and likely undying obsession with words in words—Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth class. He is a product of Buy N’ Large (as you might guess, a fictional organization ripe for satirical thrusting). Lonely and contemplative his design is to shovel the leftovers of absent humankind and shape them into blocks and stack the blocks like a child building nothing.

He is a bit of a naughty robot. If he finds something he likes—for him it is the jewelry case rather than the ring within he trashes—he keeps it for his collection of forgotten culture and highlights the sad irony that we like WALL-E distance ourselves from the drudgery of production with products themselves.

The film shifts from bleak satire to romantic comedy with the introduction of EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a floating and feminine and feisty machine WALL-E falls for. I laughed at the robots clumsy in their attempts to introduce themselves. As T.S. Eliot and Quentin Tarantino claimed, great art steals from other great art, and “WALL-E” channels Ford and Woody Allen among others within the first 30 minutes while creating its own identity.

After things go outer space to the Axiom ship, we see where humans have gone and what they have become. In one respect or another, they remind me of people I see and talk to now—both amusing and horrifying. Director Andrew Stanton leaves behind the mediocre and antiseptic Finding Nemo to challenge us in the vein of Jonathan Swift.

Unfortunately, the film loses its smarts around the last third. Earlier, Captain McCrea of the Axiom was introduced as a captain only in name, seemingly a hair away from being as stupid as the rest of humankind. He inexplicably becomes the hero in an all-too-easy action sequence, and as Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com writes, we are expected to forgive the shortcomings of humankind at the conclusion.

For all its morbid lessons about our planet and caustic swipes at consumerism and effective romantic humor, the film takes the easy and traditional way out and briefly transforms into the cute harmless voyage I had feared but trusted would not materialize after such a beautifully crafted first hour.

Oh “WALL-E,” brilliance was once your art.

***1/2 (out of four stars)