why not kick it at home in your jammies?!
over dinner one night with my co-instructors; katie mentioned having recently seen wall*e. her face lit up as she described how much she enjoyed it. so with a long holiday week to chill, i saw wall*e and....just like that i was 10 years old again; laughing out loud and wide-eyed with 'ooo that is so cool!'. the parable: earth having buried in rubbish, humans have retreated to space as blobs who never move (literally they hover everywhere) and food is now micro-smoothies, nothing solid. this gets a bit creepy (you know, bone loss in zero gravity). the humans all look like weebles in red suits drinking out of giant sippy cups. the robots are way cooler.
let me just put it out that pixar OWNS. no other animation studio can touch what these cats are doing; the environments, the characterizations, rendering, shading (did you know there's a whole team devoted to shading?!), sound design, music score; just exquisite on so many levels. (the pixar studio is here in the east bay and on the other side of the security gate lies the nirvana of 'coolest place on earth to work where they do amazingly cool stuff'). getting a job there, even sweeping the floors, is like winning the lottery.
adults have the same reverence for a pixar movie as do the youth. there's always some intelligence and clever wit to a pixar story even despite the DISNEY MOMENT (you know, where it gets a bit corny and sweet). every pixar movie has that...i'm convinced this is part of their partnership agreement. sweet + corny is the disney raison d'etre. if wall*e and eve were french robots - they would fight, swoon, lose one another to grave misfortune, and mope over their loss for eternity while looking really cool and mopey. americans have a hard time buying nihilism in real life, let alone a cartoon.
however, no matter how cool and sophisticated you may be: the DISNEY MOMENT will get you. it's emotional crack. bambi did it, pinocchio did it, and if dumbo didn't get you, you're definitely not human. i still smile when i see pictures of that flying baby elephant.
so, yes i smiled when wall*e and eve have their sweet DISNEY MOMENT holding hands, or eve's frantic attempt to save wall* with a new motherboard and hardware, and the corny song from hello dolly! and louis armstrong's cover of la vie en rose (i love that song!) wall*e's cute little cockroach homie, and the little surviving plant in a shoe that reminded me of charlie chaplin. it's a lovely, charming, and irresistible piece of animation art that makes you feel a bit like...the first time you went on it's a small world at disneyland. it's all about the magic.
Wall-E NYT Critic's Pick
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