A bit too much has been made of the silent-movie aspects of Pixar’s latest, “WALL • E.”
OK, so the last robot on Earth and star of director-writer Andrew Stanton’s dystopian fable about love and planetary calamity doesn’t say much as he goes about his business.
This is little cause for worry. After all, WALL • E — which isn’t a name, but a designation for a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — communicates with beeps, clangs and whirrs that speak to us. He’s voiced by Ben Burtt, who gave such indelible life to “Star Wars” ‘bot R2D2.
Instead, the problems with “WALL • E” — and there are some — come because Pixar’s latest and arguably its most ambitious G-movie to date opens within a post-apocalyptic realm. And as cute as our hero is, it takes a while for the movie to find a hopeful groove.
When Earth’s residents departed 700 years earlier on a spaceship, the wee cube of a machine was left behind by the Buy n Large corporation to clean up the mess. So he pursues his programmed task, collecting, compacting and stacking Earth’s detritus into skyscrapers of garbage.
WALL • E is our guide to this lonely planet. And what we see is brown and bleak. His only company is a darting cockroach named Hal.
In his rummaging, WALL • E finds objects that tickle his fancy: a Rubik’s Cube, a bra, a Zippo lighter.
For solace, he plays over and over a scene from the decidedly 20th-century musical “Hello, Dolly!” Sung by Mi chael Crawford’s Cornelius Hackl to Irene Molloy, “It Only Takes a Moment” creates an unmistakable yearning in the tiny romantic.
“It only takes a moment for your eyes to meet and then your heart knows in a moment you will never be alone again.”
For our hero, this moment comes when EVE arrives.
The Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator has been sent to Earth in search of plant life by the captain of the Axiom.
She’s as sleek as WALL • E is clunky. She’s focused on her “directive” and, as WALL • E quickly learns, she’s frightfully handy with a laser. In a live-action flick, Angelina Jolie would play EVE.
His crush goes mostly unnoticed, even after a sandstorm shuts down EVE and he stands a sweet vigil.
As his affection starts to make a dent, a ship retrieves EVE. WALL • E follows her into space.
It’s not often the case in animated films that the humans are such a welcome sight. Talking animals, even bleeping ‘bots, are charming company enough.
So it’s odd that it takes a ship full of hefty humans to lighten this film’s dour mood.
The size of the humans came about, says Disney-Pixar folk, because a NASA adviser told them this is what the human body would evolve into after 700 years of zero gravity.
The script’s truth seems more pointed, more ripped from headlines about American obesity.
Earth’s former inhabitants do nothing but consume. They jet around on floating loungers, for one. They eat and eat (“umm, a cupcake in a cup”). Engrossed with their personal entertainment devices, they don’t connect with each other (though a nursery suggests otherwise). And they’re startled to find the ship has a pool and a track.
The movie manages to depict the sloth, but not to ridicule it so much that we can’t root for the roly-poly passengers on the biggest cruise ship ever. It helps to have John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy providing voices for John and Mary, humans who begin, with WALL • E’s help, to see how strange their pampered lives are.
Funnyman Fred Willard plays Shelby Forthright. The CEO of the Buy n Large corporation, makers of basically everything on Earth and beyond, appears via video. Talk about your superstores. Its reach includes the robots, the cruise ships and the planetary disaster that has made a five-year cruise a 700-years exile.
If that strikes you as too much gravity, you’re not alone.
Still, at movie’s end, like the best kind of love, WALL • E’s affection for EVE promises to transform a community.
His intelligence may be artificial, but his heroism is anything but superficial.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also on
“WALL • E”
G. 1 hour, 37 minutes. Directed by Andrew Stanton; written by Stanton, Jim Reardon and Pete Docter; starring voice talent Ben Burtt, Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger, Elissa Knight Opens today at area theaters.
