WALL·E (2008)

[It might come as a total surprise to loyal readers that, on July 18, WALL·E is the movie I chose to see. "With The Dark Knight next door?" you might ask. There are a myriad of reasons for this strange choice - not the least of which being the possession of IMAX tickets for Saturday that might be spoiled by seeing this spectacle on a comparatively small screen. So for now, enjoy some family entertainment.]

Andrew Stanton, along with the geniuses at PIXAR who collectively brought to the screen new classics like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, has done something completely remarkable. He and his cohorts have given life to a few robots and created some of the most humanly sympathetic characters I've ever seen.

To give away too much of a plot summary would be to take away some of the magic of the film, which relies almost exclusively on visuals (rather than dialogue, which is almost nonexistent in the first half of the movie) to tell a story. Suffice it to say that WALL·E is the last robot on an abandoned Earth who finds a new purpose in life when a strange visitor, a robot called EVE, arrives. This sci-fi fable is as grand as it is eloquent, sweeping as it is sentimental, and touching as it is terrific.

Can we say much about acting here, aside from Fred Willard's classically and beautifully hammy turn as the Global CEO (the only live-action role in a Pixar movie to date)? Almost all the voicework is done by Ben Burtt - the man who brought you R2-D2's signature bloops and be-doops -who uses tech sounds rather than human vocalizations to give "voice" to characters who have no vocal chords. No, the real stars here are the animators at PIXAR, who breathe life into these robots with a simple twitch of the "eyes."

There's so much power in anthropomorphization that I actually - for the first time in a long while at the cinema - got choked up. I'm more prone to that sort of thing in the home theater, so for a big screen motion picture to do that to me in a room of about fifty people is significant in itself. These robots emote, something most of today's actors seem tragically incapable of doing. (Keanu Reeves, anyone? No thanks? I don't blame you.) Working simply with the eyepieces of WALL·E and a few longing stares at the "hand" of EVE elicited more tear-jerking feeling from me than the entire last act of Brokeback Mountain.

Visually the human characters (Willard aside) are cartoonish, on a par more with The Incredibles than with Ratatouille. But again, the movie aptly relies more on the nonsentient photorealistic beings to drive the plot forward and destroy that fourth wall so that we're too attached to the characters. I didn't care, for example, if the humans ever came back to the earth they abandoned. I just wanted WALL·E to hold EVE's hand once.

There's a political message in here somewhere about consumerist man's ability to repair an earth he has destroyed, but perhaps I'm reading too far into it. What's important is the beauty of a film that relies on simplicity itself to create one of the more complex movies to come from the Disney castle.