Wall-E

I just saw the movie Wall-E with two of my nephews and my wife. I’ve honestly got to say that I have never seen an animated movie that worked so well on so many different levels.

The movie has an important message that is gotten across in a delightful and entertaining manner. The premise of the movie is that Earth has been “temporarily” abandoned by its inhabitants because of pollution and disregard for its resources. Earth has gotten so bad that it will no longer sustain life. Wall-E is a robot working on the abandoned Earth. His job is to collect trash, compact it and stack it. The ultimate goal is to restore the Earth to a state that will once again support life. His best buddy is a cockroach. The animation was stunning. The characters became so real and the movie became so engrossing that the “animation” became transparant in that it was as if I was watching “real live characters”. The screenplay ( I guess you still call it that even for animation) was excellent. Overall I’d have to rate this as one of the more enjoyable movies I’ve ever seen…the message was great, the movie was emotionally touching, the animation was spectacular and I was sad when it finally ended. I was so wrapped up in the movie that I just wanted it to go on and on.

The movie has numerous nods to other sci-fi movies, which are fun to pick out. Allusions to “Close Encounters”, “Star Trek”, “Star Wars” and others. Plus there are some interesting sound effects that will amuse the careful listener…such as an Apple Computer Start-up Chime.

Wall-E has a personality trait that is funny…he likes to collect items of interest before collecting and compacting the trash. He carefully places his collectables on a series of movable trays and it’s a riot to see what he’s collected.

To be honest, I had tears streaming down my face on more than one occasion during the movie. It was an animated movie for goodness sake! What’s that all about? Well, it’s about a movie that was so well crafted and seemed so real that it hit all the emotional buttons that a movie with real live actors would hit. It’s truly a family movie but has enough adult content to keep the adults as engaged as the kids. Highly recommended.

And do you -really- think that Wall-E looks “exactly” like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit?