Wall-E (2008)

**Minor spoilers follow**

Wall-E is one of my favorite Pixar movies.  It ties with Up for the number one spot, and I can’t choose between the two.  What puts Wall-E up at the top of the list is not just the beautiful animation and the fantastic storytelling (done with almost no dialogue), but Wall-E himself.

I am very fond of my action heroes, and a lot of grey area characters, and, admittedly, a lot of villains.  Wall-E is none of those.  Wall-E is the sweetest, gentlest, most romantic, naïve, generous, genuine, and most helpful character ever.  He is probably the nicest fictional character I’ve ever loved.

This is the magic of Wall-E.

Wall-E is one of the most amazingly wonderful characters ever created.  The fact that he doesn’t really speak, that his character is conveyed strictly through his physical appearance and actions, just makes the beauty of his character even greater.

The quick synopsis:

It is the future.  Earth has been evacuated and abandoned to mountains of trash and dust storms, but one lone little robot carries on with the job he was programmed to do:  clean up the trash.  Wall-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter- Earth Class.  He’s a little trash compactor.  He trundles around, compacting trash into neat little cubes and stacking those into towers.  One day, a spaceship arrives and drops off a probe, Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), designed to look for vegetation, and Wall-E’s life is changed forever.  He falls in love with Eve (whose name he can’t pronounce, and he calls her Eva), and he follows her into space, to the giant starliner Axiom, one of the spaceships that humans have been living on for the last 700 years.

The first half hour of the movie is my favorite.  We follow Wall-E around as he does his job.  He may be alone (except for his pet cockroach), but he finds beauty in everything.  He marvels at a glimpse of the night sky, and films it on his internal recorder.  When he stows away on the departing spaceship, the first thing he does in space is ooh and ahh over the view.  When he locates where Eve is stored, the first thing he does is point out at the sky to share that beauty with her.  He takes in all the sights in space with genuine awe at their beauty.

Wall-E is also a collector.  As he compacts trash on his daily rounds, he collects all manner of things that appeal to him.  His home is full of his found treasures.  His biggest treasure is a video tape of Hello Dolly, that he watches and re-watches in the evenings.  He has an internal recorder, and he records the things he loves the most, like the clear night sky, and bits of Hello Dolly, particularly the part where two characters hold hands to express their love.

Then Eve arrives.  Where he is terrestrial and boxy and low tech, she is sleek and shiny and high tech, and she flies and soars with elegant grace.  She is beautiful, and Wall-E falls in love just about instantly.

He follows her around, makes her a statue (and is crushed when she rejects it), joyfully shows her all the treasures is his home, shows her his precious Hello Dolly video.  He takes care of her when she shuts down, and, unwilling to lose her, he desperately follows her into space.  All this is conveyed with almost no dialogue.  Wall-E says Eve’s name, but other than a couple words, he conveys everything he’s feeling with physicality.  And his heart is worn right on his sleeve.  Wall-E is one of the most expressive and heart felt characters I’ve ever seen. 

But as much as I love that first half hour, a lot of the Wall-E’s true strengths come out in the rest of the movie.  Because Wall-E changes every single character he meets for the better, with the exception of the two bad guys, and for those, he serves as a catalyst to action.  From Eve to M-O to the door-opener robot who learns to wave a greeting, to the two big Wall-A load lifters, to the host of damaged robots, to the captain, to John and Mary.  Wall-E greets everyone he meets with warmth and compassion and wide-eyed-optimism and joy.  Wall-E cannot even conceive of bad people.  And each one who meets Wall-E discovers they can break out of their programmed lives and start really living again.

And that is ultimately what this movie is about.  It’s about living.  Living your own life.  Taking control of your own life.  Following your dreams with joy and open hearts.  Everything on the Axiom is run by robots.  Even the literal paths the robots are allowed to traverse are designated lines on the floors.  Until Wall-E shows them they don’t have to keep following a line in the ground.  Wall-E doesn’t try to change anyone.  He simply greets everyone with joy, offers open friendship to all, and points out the beauty and love in the world.  That example is all that’s needed to open the eyes of those he meets.

Even when Wall-E is grievously damaged, his first reaction when M-O approaches is to hold out his hand and introduce himself.  He doesn’t ask for help, he simply says the equivalent of hello, happy to meet you.

In the commentary on this film, the director, Andrew Stanton, says that the theme of the film was that irrational love can conquer life’s programming.  The rest of the story was conceived in service of that theme, and was not meant to be messag-ey in any other way.  As a writer, I understand that.

I talked with a lot of people when Wall-E first came out who found negative takeaways in this movie.  Some got stuck on objecting to reading in an environmental message, etc., or they got hung up or offended by depiction of these futuristic people, but that misses out on the wonder and joy and happiness of watching a truly nice character change the world in his quest to find love, happiness, and meaning in life.

This has been an entry for the Robots in Film blogathon. Follow the link to read the other entries in this blogathon.  I will also be reviewing the 1971 film Silent Running.