Eye Candy #24 - "WALL-E"

WALL-E: I can see very easily how some people are going to either love or hate this movie. It's not your standard PIXAR fare. The witty banter? Gone. The light-hearted silliness? Gone. It’s been replaced with a straight forward love story with very little dialogue and a serious message of eco-awareness and consumerism to the Nth degree. Would "Finding Extinction" have been a more appropriate title? I don't know. What is great about this movie is that artistically, it's the best foray to date by PIXAR. It's stunning to watch and the level of detail goes beyond "Nemo" and "The Incredibles". To me, it felt that for the first time, rather than make an animated CARTOON, they made an animated MOVIE. To put it bluntly, the PIXAR movie has grown up. The film is the story of WALL-E, the last robot cleaning up the planet Earth centuries after humanity evacuated the planet. He goes about his job consolidating waste into blocks and then building giant towers of blocks, and collecting bric-a-brac he finds like a Rubik's cube, a spork, a VHS copy of "Hello Dolly". He and his only friend (a roach) live their little existence until one day they are visited a spaceship that leaves behind another, more advanced robot named EVE, who is there to evaluate Earth for humanity's return (her specific goal is to search for plant life). WALL-E and EVE begin to bond, until EVE is whisked back to the humanity's spaceship and WALL-E tags along to find her, having fallen in love with her. Humanity, however, now has the exaggerated behaviors of consuming that ruined Earth in the first place. Nor do all parties on the ship want to go to back to Earth. The film has funny moments (the humor is more akin to Buster Keaton than "Nemo"), the obligatory John Ratzenberger voicework, and some honest-to-goodness emotion here. You may not laugh like you did at "Nemo", but you won't be able to help being taken in by the views. Woodchuck sez, "Check it out."