CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Wall-E

Sunday, December 28, 2008

this entry brought to you by kings of leon, "crawl"





When the credits started to roll after Wall-E, the first word out of my mouth was "Wow". I've said this before, and I'm certainly not the first person to say so: I don't know how Pixar does it, but there is something about their movies, particularly with Finding Nemo and thereafter, where they have stopped being merely great, and moved into this upper strata of untouchable cinema. People have said Cars was a misstep, but it was still a great movie on its own and a misstep I'm sure every other animation studio in the world would like to have on their IMDB page. Their movies are that good. Wall-E is that good.

When we first heard about Wall-E, there was talk that there was no dialog, and once the movie came out, well, that turned out to not be true. The first twenty five minutes have no dialog, but even once the dialog starts, it's very, very minimal-- Wall-E pretty much just says "Eee-vah!", and Eve pretty much just says "Wall-E!" with various inflections, there are a few characters with lines, but once it's the dialog has started, only one other character besides the two main robots has much screen presence. Which leaves us with pure directing to keep this movie going. Keep in mind that the two characters you care the most about are objects-- granted, those objects show a remarkable range of emotion, but the point is that the animators had to do a lot of work to make these objects relate feelings that you can be compassionate about, and director Andrew Stanton had to rely entirely on his dead-on instincts of pacing, character, and camera work to make this ship float. In lesser hands, Wall-E wouldn't have just been a bad movie-- it would've been a completely different movie, because I'm convinced anyone with less talent than Stanton would've immediately changed a lot of aspects about it. Wall-E probably would've been voiced by Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams, for one.

All this is to say that Wall-E isn't just kids stuff-- well, what Pixar movie is?-- but an achievement in film making itself. Other movies have attempted to do what Wall-E has done, to make you care for something non human, but Wall-E makes it look easy, by subverting a few of the very conventions of modern film making. But it's also this beautiful, triumphant combination of the modern cinema and Chaplin-era Hollywood. It is one of the most technically magnificent of any CGI film-- to the average person's eyes this might not look much different than the original Toy Story, but the dusty remnants of a post-apocalyptic Earth to the pristine, hyper-detailed world of the spaceship the bulk of Wall-E's plot take place on, are the work of extremely powerful computers with supremely talented environment artists-- but the storytelling hearkens back to a time when we had to love characters through their body language and the chemistry between two people, more than by what they say. If you haven't seen Wall-E and you feel all the talk of it being a cinematic achievement is hyperbole, you're mistaken, and you need to see this film, preferably with your kids.
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with love from CRS @ 8:52 AM 

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