More than any human characters in the film, WALL-E and EVE-machines without many human features that are nevertheless cleverly personified and identifiable to the audience-develop a believable relationship and even blossoming romance: no small feat. While these speaking roles provide some context for the Axiom’s journey (and what’s happened to Earth), the story is still an overwhelming visual feast, moving forward through clever clues and details that allude to the destructive reality of human existence, such as the endless advertisements maintaining the veneer of consumerist utopia across the Axiom.Ī major part of the success of WALL-E lies in the development and emotification of robot characters. The main voices we hear are those of the Captain (Jeff Garlin) and BnL CEO Shelby Forthright in archival footage (recently deceased comedy legend Fred Willard). Even when human characters are introduced aboard the Axiom, dialogue is kept to a relative minimum for a feature-length film.
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With little dialogue, Pixar’s powers of visual storytelling are at full strength in this romance: whirs, beeps and meaningful looks propel the robots’ budding relationship.
This film is revolutionary in the sense that Pixar not only delivers complex subject matter in a kid’s film, but also manages to tell it in a nearly wordless way. It is also a film worth revisiting simply because it is one of Pixar’s best: a beautifully rendered romance played out entirely through nonverbal dialogue alongside a not-so-subtle but ever-important social critique accessible to the whole family. If WALL-E-and its message on a crumbling environment and rampant consumerism-felt relevant in 2008, it’s almost too easy to say it feels even more so in 2020. There, he finds the remaining members of the human race, shipped by BnL into space for a perpetual “cruise.” The passengers move about only in mobile lounge chairs, interacting via screens and drinking all their food for the sake of convenience. When EVE finds a plant among WALL-E’s collection, WALL-E stows away on the vessel that brings EVE back to the cruise ship Axiom. One day, his life is disrupted by the arrival of EVE, a robot sent by BnL to look for signs of life on Earth. The eponymous robot is the last denizen of Earth (along with his pet cockroach), and has picked up the habit of collecting trinkets from days gone by, becoming enamored with treasures like the 1969 musical, Hello, Dolly! on VHS, through which he learns about humanity. Several centuries in the future, the Earth has been ravaged by environmental disaster, leaving behind the remnants of the Buy n Large company (BnL), a massive company with inordinate influence on the world. But beneath the gentleness lies a still-relevant critique on what makes us fundamentally human.
The social message we find in Wall-E comes softly and sweetly in the form of a small, endearingly innocent robot still running on an outdated program to pick up trash long after earth’s human inhabitants have left (but have also left behind mountains of garbage). A post-apocalyptic film made for kids, it bypasses the usual terrors of the human downfall violent conflict, global plagues, cosmic collisions? Hardly. The summer of 2008 saw the glorious and yet understated release of Pixar’s robot romance WALL-E.
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