Wall E (2008)

01Jul08

Wall E IMDB Link

Directed By: Andrew Stanton

Written By: Andrew Stanton

Starring: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin

When I first saw Wall E it was a late night show and there wasn’t a kid in the audience. The picture ended, the credits started to roll and no one moved; everyone just sat there trying to suck in a little bit more of the story by watching the 8-bit imagery. Wall E was that good, it was amazing.

I’m not Pauline Kael and I never will be, my eloquence in dissecting a film and expounding it’s greatness will never reach her level but I started this blog in attempt to better express my feelings on films. The film was so amazing that my head was swimming with all the things I wanted to talk about but it would inevitably come out as “Wall E was the shit”. I’ve calmed down since and decided to change that 4 word review into a single idea. To me, Wall E reminds us all of the power of film and why we even watch them in the first place. It’s rare these days that a film can evoke such a wide array of emotions from you and it’s even rarer that a short circuit look-a-like that basically only says his name can do it.

I feel like Wall E is a modern day Chaplin film where the tramp is now played by a lovable, poor, lonely robot. Pixar maximizes the greatest power of Film: empathy, and we’re there isolated with Wall E, cheering him along pulling for him to succeed. The first 30 minutes of the movie are I hate to use the word: magical. Your completely mesmerized by Wall E and the destroyed Earth surroundings soaking in the imagery trying to figure out what in the hell happened. It wasn’t a cartoon or a cg film it was the introduction to an amazing sci-fi picture.

I always say that Pixar is to film as Blizzard Entertainment is the video games. Both companies have a philosophy for absolute perfection and refuse to release anything sub par even with the amount of success they garner. The thing about Pixar is every time they are about to release a film we as movie goers hold our breath. We know it will be amazing, we know it will be great but in the back of our head we’re all dreading the day that maybe they’ll lose it, they’ll just lose the touch and the golden age will end (Remember how scared you were when the Finding Nemo trailer’s popped up or The Cars ones?). Their ability to tell a story is just amazing. There is always so many layers of entertainment /art/emotion/character development in each scene and the way they sprinkle in exposition for later scenes without halting the flow is grand.

Wall E is not only a comparable film to add to Pixar’s shelf, they damn near outdid themselves as a studio and it just might be my favorite Pixar film. Wall E was amazing and Pixar is amazing. The short before the film was great too. I wonder if the people at Pixar are fans of Portal, one of the most unique video games ever released and many critics game of the year in 2007. The short before Wall E was very Portal-esque and the robots in the film had a very Portal feel. Maybe it’s all cyclical, Valve tried to make robots that looked like apple products and Pixar saw those apple influenced robots and tweaked them a bit, I don’t know. The only thing I know is you have to go see Wall E right now.

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Tags: movie review, Pixar, Wall E