Wall-E — 10 Years Later (Stanton, 2008)

Wall-E is near the top of the list of films I call “friendship killers.” 

Find yourself on the wrong side of a critical debate or a fanboy crusade about most films and you are probably used to (if you are a professional critic) some snarky e-mails and snappy put-downs. That’s the nature of the Internet where half the comments are from bots and the other half are from paid advocates who are working off a talking points script.

But there are other films that engender such passionate devotion that failing to love them is too often treated as a personal betrayal. Inside Out and Up are other Pixar films that can provoke strained interpersonal relationships. Twilight and Harry Potter discussions quickly descend into either condescension or vituperation. Disagree about anything Wes Anderson has ever made and you better be ready with your mute button on Twitter. The essence of a postmodern world, as Rob points out in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, is that what you like is more important than what you are like.

I’ve never liked Wall-E nor understood the love it receives. But ten years is a long time. Long enough, perhaps, for even the most stubborn naysayer to come around? I revisited the film a decade after its initial release to find out.

Was Wall-E  Really That Good?

One contributing factor to Wall-E‘s being overpraised, in my opinion, is that the Oscar-nominated films of 2008 weren’t that great. They certainly weren’t beloved. Slumdog Millionaire is a better film than Crash, but one wonders if it, too, benefited from being more palatable fare in the year of a better but gayer movie. (Milk was not as esteemed as Brokeback Mountain, but it was good enough to get Sean Penn another statue.) Wall-E dominated the animation category, easily defeating Bolt and Kung Fu Panda in a three-way race. The juxtaposition of a rout in the animation category and the lack of a clear favorite in the Best Picture category made it fashionable to argue that the only reason Wall-E wasn’t vying for the bigger prize was that animation was not yet regarded as a suitable genre for serious, artistic fare.

It’s also human nature to overpraise whatever is innovative. Wall-E was two years ahead of The Artist in terms of having a non-speaking protagonist. It basically emulates the style and techniques of a silent film. James Cameron’s Avatar, and the consequent reemergence of 3D as a commercial form, was also a year in the future. Not that Wall-E was 3D, but its computer animation, so different from the hand-drawn animation associated with Disney, was still “gee-whiz” inducing, even if, for my money, it was (and is) less aesthetically rich and visually interesting.

What I Say Now

As it did ten years ago, Wall-E held my interest for the first twenty minutes. Pixar films are great at creating backstories, and the efficiency of its world building is undeniable. If I had a movie ticket for every time I’ve heard someone say that the pre-title sequence of Up or the short film that accompanied a Pixar feature were superior, self-contained masterpieces, I would need never pay to go to the cinema again.

But world-building does not a narrative make, and Wall-E has an awfully difficult time parlaying its art design and background details into an engaging story. As with (the admittedly better) A.I., there feels like there is something duplicitous in having a machine as the protagonist and then anthropomorphizing it in order to induce human emotion. It’s one thing to have human movies and music playing in the background. It’s quite another to have Wall-E watching images rapturously or playing the soundtrack so that he can whistle while he works.  (Oh, look, he’s got a pet roach, it’s just like Jiminy Cricket!) The entire second act–once Eve shows up–feels like a single, metafictive joke stretched out too long. Wall-E doesn’t get that Eve is a robot! How cute! How adorable! How can he get an unfeeling machine to love him? The point, of course, is not for him to get Eve to love him but to get the audience to love him by acting the part of a cute toy come to life.

The representation of humans is also a problem. They are fat and lazy, though not so far gone that their spirit of adventure cannot be roused by a plucky robot. We mercifully get more color in the third act, but action descends into Looney Tunes slapstick. Put screengrabs from the first third and last third and it is like looking at two different movies. The animated humans also make the use of actual humans (in archival footage) problematic. If the humans of Wall-E‘s world look like this, why do the movies he found look like us?

When I was in high school, I remember a friend saying that Ghostbusters was so funny, its protagonists so cool, that it was almost enough to make him wish something like its climax could and would happen in real life. I don’t think he was serious, but I’ve thought about that remark many times as I sat through spies averting the missile launch and superheroes averting the end of the world. If a few billion people die in the process, why should that keep us from admitting that Wall-E‘s post-environmental disaster earth is a warmer, wittier, happier place than most of us will ever know? If only robots could feel, maybe humans could learn to be human too. If only this were real.

Wouldn’t that be great?

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8 Replies to “Wall-E — 10 Years Later (Stanton, 2008)”

  1. Shahin

    I saw Wall-e last night in a cinema in Barcelona, Spain. I had heard of it many many times in praise and awe. The movie was rubbish.
    Beside all the facts that you mentioned, there are many many western-supramacy sign in the movie. All captains were white caucasian men, the humans are mostly white, with some black exceptions as peripheral characters, but no one from other races. No trace to other races, and their culture when you have pointers to “good old Earth”. The musical movie that WallE liked were white American culture, the music he liked, and even the photos appeared on the captain’s screen were all “white/caucasian culture”, as it was the only culture and race on earth. And the movie was supposed to raise awareness about environment, however in the end casting we see “fishering” in the rivers, which all environmentally aware ppl know how damaging fishering is to the environment. This movie was a pure rubbish, and who praises it, neither is an observant, nor a movie critic, nor interested in earth.

    • Billy

      […] That’s like me saying I hate black panther – not because of the story or the acting or the music or the cinematography – but because most of the actors were black people. Shame on you for bringing race into this.[This comment was edited by blog author.]

    • J

      There were black and female captains of the Axiom. It’s super easy to look up. Captain O’Brien was black. Captain Fee was an asian woman.

      All the captains are also named and modeled after the animators who made the film, so.

      This is a pretty weird, pointlessly prejudiced argument that anyone with 30 seconds and a search engine could debunk.

    • Nathaniel Matthew

      wow. I’m guessing your indian. I’m indian too and I know that we can be super racist toward white people. I don’t know what your problem is with the movie is other than the fact that you don’t like western culture. There’s a reason that western countries are more industrialized. That was the point of the movie. Greedy corporations. The pitfalls of capitalism. Living in the now without care for the consequences of your actions. That’s what the movie was about. Smh.

    • Sully :)

      “All captains were white caucasian men, the humans are mostly white, with some black exceptions as peripheral characters, but no one from other races.”
      With the exception of Captain #2 being an Asian Female and Captain #5 being a black Male, the main leads being two robots, the comedic relief also being all robots, the main villain being a robot as well, and of course the thousands of variants of passengers that Pixar made for the purpose of showing every race falling victim to the same level of incompetency.

      “Beside all the facts that you mentioned, there are many many western-supramacy sign in the movie.”
      Which is why the entire Earth (Only America though because ipods, Rubix Cubes, lightbulbs, and consumerism is exclusive to America) has fallen victim to hedonism and entropy. If Spain had invented denim jeans, string lights, and landed on the moon instead of the kinsmen of the Western Supremacists over at Pixar, Earth wouldn’t be covered in satellites, smog, and comically large towers of trash

      Wall-E has it’s flaws, but one of the things it did perfectly was show that no human is superior. The obese Caucasian captain had the same education as literally everybody else on the ship, abusing the same technology once reserved for the disabled.
      The CEO is a criticism of Western Consumerist culture and is physically modeled after Ronald Reagan, president of the United States during the second “age of excess”(Would you rather they made him a Barcelonian?)
      Hello Dolly’s usage in Wall-E was to contrast the world 700 years after humanity’s exodus, and has the meta context of Disney and Fox’s normally competitive relationship being cut through via personal, human friendships. You didn’t mention the multiple references to 2001: A space odyssey that were in the movie, so I won’t mention it :). I’m kidding of course, I don’t like you. Stanley Kubrick’s masterwork* had inspired Steve Jobs, who purchased Lucasfilm’s CG department, which later became Pixar. Western Supremacist Steve Jobs was the co-founder of the Apple Computer Company. He died because of his belief in western ideology, making sure to use exclusively western medicine to cure his cancer (Serves him right if you ask me, forcing all those poor western ‘people’ into buying his inferior products at gunpoint). He also made the iphone. I know this by the way because he went to my house, wheeled himself to the front door (all that western medicine crippled him), and forced me to buy his phone or else he was going to “send me to Barcelona, Spain”, a fate truly worse than death. This is why Wall-E shares the Macintosh’s iconic power-on sound by the way. I figured that I should include this and the previous sentence because I don’t think you knew this, and I also wanted to belittle you.

      Your stupid comment from nearly 3 years ago has me seething right now if it’s any consolation.

      *I only say masterwork because all of the people involved with the movie were from the Western half of the globe. Were there Spanish “people” involved, I wouldn’t even touch the movie.

  2. Moses

    @Shahin: Wow, you are filled with hate for White people.

    Pixar is an American company. They make films primarily for the American market.

    Duh – of course the characters and setting in the film are American.

    No one complains that Bollywood or Chinese films feature only Indians or Chinese.

    Give me a break. Peddle your hate elsewhere.

  3. Billy

    One of the points in this review I disagree with is the one about eve being a robot and wall-e apparently not understanding that. The film explores concepts such as self awareness in AI and machine learning, which is why wall-e is one of, if not, the last models left.

    The representation of humans is a possible future, if we become too dependent on machines. I don’t understand how you can simply glaze over these deeper ideas when critiquing the movie.

    • Ethan Sheehan

      I’d have to agree with you. I think the author of this article seriously misunderstood the story and the motives of the character.

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