FAVORITE FILM OF 2008!

WALL-E

Well, the Oscars have been announced and most everyone is moving on from the annual year-end wrap up that every normal human being, and pop cultural critic, goes through. But the countdown must be finished, regardless of how irrelevant another glorious praise of Wall-E will be.

The PIXAR movies are being rightfully praised for operating on a peak level of quality at nearly every level, from the technical standpoint of the lush computer animation to the screenwriting and, to the enormous appreciation of parents everywhere, making a movie with appeal to kids and adults simultaneously. And it’s not just thinly veiled momentary winks to parents and grownups with a mature cultural reference. With Finding Nemo and even moreso with the Incredibles (and those are two of the three total Pixars I’ve seen) there seemed to be a throwback to a variety of classic film genres and a subtle commentary on the mythology of heroism and its representation in cartoon character form. So for film snobs that weren’t past looking at pretty images and cute characters, there was something in every pixel to enjoy.

Wall-E was enormously satisfying because it used the Pixar template of smart, crowd-friendly animation, and executed with perfect pitch a combination of my favorite cultural sub-genres.

At first, it’s a wonderful science fiction story. One of my favorite movies is 2001: A Space Oddysey, and Wall-E's space imagery as well as the absolute immersion in a posited future brought back memories of that film. The HAL-9000 lookalike helped as well.

Second, it’s a darkly satirical movie. While there’s romance and action, Wall-E would not exist if it wasn’t for the society devastated by blind and massive consumption. Of course, some people might be offended by this set-up, thinking it too preachy, but this isn’t an anti Wall-Mart documentary. An Earth so overhwhelmed by trash that it’s population had to leave the planet serves as the primary setup to the robot characters’ conflicts. In this sense, the movie goes back to my love for science fiction, particularly the bleak landscapes of Phillip K. Dick stories. The literature I have read of his is incredibly action-driven (which is probably why so many of his books have been made into movies) but they also paint a portrait, inspired by fifties consumer culture, of a world that is hardly enlightened and is altered into a new quasi-alien landscape not because of an invasion or technological advances, but because of the most base human instincts running rampant into either abandoning or constraining anything of beauty. More recently, the engaging satire Idiocracy by Mike Judge tapped into an interesting update of this satire, adding the glorification of stupidity and laziness in the Bush years into an even more frightening future if those qualities were encouraged in leadership and authority.

With a budget, potential audience and studio backing that Idiocracy never had, Wall-E is able to fully imagine this type of dystopian universe. I was captivated in turn by how the film, in a introductory period with no dialogue except Wall-E’s beeps and blurps, was allowed to have an almost dark indie-film character (28 Days Later, Blade Runner, come to mind) as the lonely environment that has been wrought by humanity dominates over the little robot until he gains a personality in order to cope. But as dystopian literature would likely create imagery taking you deeper into the darker corners of this world, Wall-E takes a different track because of the necessary Disneyfication and lets the little robot persevere and go about his curious tasks all the while becoming more human and develop a desire for companionship.

I can’t say that I can completely remove my cynicism circuit and enjoy “kids” movies, especially when weaker elements of the plot are presented to move the story along to its happily ever after conclusion. But Wall-E is wonderful because its innocence and cuteness shines through a fully realized bleak landscape. Romance between artificial intelligence in spite of toxic surroundings is the type of movie lovey dovey stuff I can cheer on.