Out of this world

Daring 'WALL-E' is a family film with a cautionary message that even parents can love

June 27, 2008|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

With "WALL-E," Pixar at last takes the great leap forward many of us knew the company had in it. A "family movie" in name and MPAA rating only, it's a major visionary work, a sci-fi parable of astonishing scope and depth that is anchored by an adorable bucket of bolts and yoked to a sensibility that is - there's no other word for it - furious. It's also, by a substantial margin, the best American film of the year to date.

The accomplishment of director Andrew Stanton, his co-writers Pete Docter and Jim Reardon, and the artists and computer jockeys who work under Pixar majordomo John Lasseter can be gauged by the disturbing awe we feel at the trash-choked disaster man has made of his home planet. "WALL-E" begins on a ravaged Earth centuries in the future; humans have long since fled in cruise-line spaceships, leaving behind small robots with sad, binocular eyes to sweep up the mess. These are called Waste Allocation Load Lifters, Earth-class - WALL-Es for short - and there appears to be only one left in working order.

As you'd expect, he's lonely. WALL-E spends his days compacting detritus into cubes and piling them up; early on, we realize with a start that what seem to be skyscrapers are in fact towering ziggurats of our leftover junk. At night, WALL-E puzzles over his keepsakes - a Rubik's Cube, a rubber duck - and watches a videotape of the 1969 musical "Hello, Dolly!," obsessively returning to the Michael Crawford love song "Out There." (He's not a Streisand fan, I guess.)

These scenes are stunning in their wide-screen attention to detail and their refusal to let us off the hook. While there is a standard Disney sidekick critter, it's a cockroach; surprisingly cute, but still, a cockroach. The first act of "WALL-E" is, daringly, a post-apocalyptic silent movie that picks up where the last act of "AI: Artificial Intelligence" left off.

What keeps us from hanging ourselves in the theater? Two things: WALL-E himself - he's an ingeniously designed pip, with a timid curiosity and a comically stalwart sense of duty - and the arrival of EVE, a gleaming white probe from the BnL Corp.'s cruiseship far out in space. Her name stands for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, and she's looking for plants - evidence that Earth is ready for recolonization. By chance, WALL-E has just turned one up, a delicate shoot he's repotted into a shoe.

So this is what Pixar is asking us to buy into: a romance between two robots. Because it is Pixar, bringing wit and intelligence to kiddie CGI fare that usually has none, the task turns out to be unexpectedly easy.