If you thought Nemo and Buzz Lightyear were cute, brace yourself
for WALL•E, one of the most endearing characters, robotic or otherwise, ever to
grace a movie screen.
With its newest CG-animated creation, Disney-Pixar has
outdone itself. The fact that WALL•E, a robotic trash compactor left stranded
on a future Earth, can communicate so much emotion without real facial
features or even a speaking voice, is an impressive feat.
Much has been made of the risk the filmmakers took in producing
a movie with almost dialogue-less main characters. But the lack of chatter felt
refreshing and let the gorgeous visuals and emotive actions of its characters
tell the story.
The action takes place in intricately appealing landscapes,
including a dazzling trip through the galaxy. Even the bleak future Earth,
almost devoid of life, is packed with visual details such as the Christmas
lights and garden gnome in WALL•E's treasure trove of a truck.
When we first meet WALL•E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter,
Earth Class), he is a forgotten robot left behind on an abandoned Earth. While
humans have gone off to live in luxury on a floating cruise ship in space, WALL•E
spends his days compacting trash back on the desolate
planet as he was designed to do.
Over the years of collecting left-over human trinkets and
watching a video of Hello, Dolly! on repeat, WALL•E comes to long for
companionship beyond his squeaky sidekick — a cockroach.
When EVE, the Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, lands
to scan Earth for signs of flora or fauna, it is love at first sight — for WALL•E,
at least.
Thus begins a quest through space as WALL•E chases EVE back
to the human's hideout — a giant ship where people are so pampered and lazy,
they can't even walk and must be transported around on floating inner-tubes.
In this vision of a future, it takes a robot to remind humans
of their humanity.
When WALL•E arrives at the human outpost, he meets the
eclectic gaggle of robots keeping the ship in working order.
All the robots in the film retain their robot-ness — the
animators never resort to sticking googly eyes or a grinning mouth on a machine
to give it a personality. Nonetheless, each electronic critter brims with
uniqueness, purpose, and emotion.
Jason Deamer, the film's character art director, recalled
how the team figured out ways to communicate WALL•E's feelings.
"Andrew [Stanton, director/co-writer] came in one day with
the inspiration for WALL•E's eyes," he said. "He had been to a
baseball game and was using a pair of binoculars. He suddenly became aware that
if he tilted them slightly, you got a very different look and feeling out of
them. That became one of the key design elements for the main character."
For research, the filmmakers and animators went to robotics
conferences and visited NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To imagine what humans would look like after atrophying for hundreds of years
in space, the team talked to NASA experts about the effects of zero gravity on
the body.
The film includes many nods to science and science fiction.
When Wall-E escapes Earth by hitchhiking on EVE's spaceship, he bumps into
Sputnik and copious space debris on his way out.
Later scenes with the human spaceship's automatic pilot,
named Auto, were reminiscent of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In a gesture of recognition to the 1979 film Alien, the producers cast
Sigourney Weaver as the ship's computer.
The idea for Wall-E started with the question, "What if
mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?"
Stanton said. "I became fascinated with the loneliness that this situation
evoked and the immediate empathy you had for this character... I was immediately
hooked and seduced by the idea of a machine falling in love with another
machine. And especially with the backdrop of a universe that has lost the
understanding of the point of living."
Ultimately, the movie explores how loneliness and love are
both universal.
When Wall-E flexes his scoop fingers and reaches out for
EVE's hand, even Romeo and Juliet would be hard pressed to rival the romantic
gesture.
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