It’s not often a kids’ movie makes an interesting point, but this time Pixar wasn’t afraid to step up to the mark and offend. In ninety minutes it cut us down to size, highlighting our selfishness, greed and apathy.
The film begins on earth, wholly deserted save for a little robot garbage collector named Wall-E and a planet-load of rubbish. He spends the first half hour of the film sifting through various relics of humanity which have now been left to rust.
One of the film’s many saving graces is its lack of celebrity; there are no Zach Efron or Lindsay Lohan voice-overs. Instead, the animated AI give themselves personalities through a mixture of cutesy anthropomorphism and endless repetitions of their names, hence ‘Waaaaallll-Eeee’.
The adventure continues, leaving behind the desert landscapes of our post-apocalyptic world for the endless beauty of outer space where WALL-E finds true love, makes a whole host of robot friends (such as BRL-A, a faulty mobile umbrella robot which has trouble keeping itself closed) and encourages the humans to return to earth.
It’s here social satire reaches its height, with the humans having spent so long in their robot-run, luxury spaceship that they have become too fat to move. Instead they lounge around in mobile deck chairs constantly watching television and eating fast food – not much has changed. The scene in which the spaceship tips to one side sending hundreds of obese, ball shaped people rolling across the floor is simply hilarious.
So WALL-E manages to successfully break the mould, simultaneously being visually stunning, a social satire and a heartfelt, funny children’s movie. This is more than just a film for all the family; this is a film for all of humanity. It’s high time we got up off our fat arses and did something with our lives before we reduce our planet to dust and expect someone or something else to pick up the pieces.
Four stars
