![]() If “Wall-E” were a romantic comedy, it would be about a humble garbageman who falls for a supermodel who also happens to be a top scientist with a knack for marksmanship. Their courtship follows some familiar patterns. One of these, a research probe named Eve (all of the robot names are acronyms as well as indicators of theoretical gender) drops to Earth and wins Wall-E’s heart. Eventually the corporation loaded its valued customers onto a space station (captained by Jeff Garlin), where they have evolved into fat, lazy leisure addicts serviced by a new generation of specialized machines. Observing Wall-E’s surroundings, the audience gleans that, in some bygone time, a conglomerate called BnL (for “Buy N Large”) filled the earth with megastores and tons of garbage. And some of it may even possess something like a soul. But some of that stuff turned out to be useful, interesting, and precious. The human species was driven off its home planet Wall-E eventually learns that we did not die out by an economy consecrated to the manufacture and consumption of ever more stuff. And the genius of “Wall-E,” which was directed by the Pixar mainstay Andrew Stanton, who wrote the screenplay with Jim Reardon, lies in its notion that creativity and self-destruction are sides of the same coin. After all, he too is a product of human ingenuity. Wall-E’s tender regard for the material artifacts of a lost civilization is understandable. In the rusty metal hulk where he and the cockroach take shelter from dust storms, he keeps a carefully sorted collection of treasures, including Zippo lighters, nuts and bolts, and a Rubik’s Cube. But not everything he finds is trash to Wall-E. His name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter- Earth Class. He is a dented little workhorse who, having outlasted his planned obsolescence, spends his days in the Sisyphean, mechanical labor of gathering and compacting garbage. That old, half-forgotten musical, with its Jerry Herman lyrics crooned by, among others, Louis Armstrong, is also among Wall-E’s mementos of, well, us. On another level entirely it’s a bit of a sci-fi geek-fest, alluding to everything from “2001” and the “Alien” pictures (via a Sigourney Weaver voice cameo) to “Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out.” But the movie it refers to most insistently and overtly is, of all things, “Hello, Dolly!,” a worn videotape that serves as the title character’s instruction manual in matters of choreography and romance. It is, undoubtedly, an earnest (though far from simplistic) ecological parable, but it is also a disarmingly sweet and simple love story, Chaplinesque in its emotional purity. Herzog muses that “the human presence on this planet is not really sustainable,” a sentiment that is voiced, almost verbatim, in the second half of “Wall-E.” When the whimsical techies at Pixar and a moody German auteur are sending out the same message, it may be time to pay attention. In his recent documentary “Encounters at the End of the World” Mr. Night Shyamalan (“The Happening”) and Werner Herzog. As the earth heats up, the vanishing of humanity has become something of a hot topic, a preoccupation shared by directors like Steven Spielberg (“A.I.”), Francis Lawrence (“I Am Legend”), M. It’s not the only film lately to engage this somber theme. It gives us a G-rated, computer-generated cartoon vision of our own potential extinction. ![]() ![]() We’ve grown accustomed to expecting surprises from Pixar, but “Wall-E” surely breaks new ground. This is a world without people, you might say without animation, though it teems with evidence of past life. Hazy, dust-filtered sunlight illuminates a landscape of eerie, post-apocalyptic silence. The scene is an intricately rendered city, bristling with skyscrapers but bereft of any inhabitants apart from a battered, industrious robot and his loyal cockroach sidekick. ![]() The first 40 minutes or so of “Wall-E” in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in. ![]()
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