Date: June 29, 2008
Location: Muvico Boynton Beach

One of Pixar’s most admirable qualities is the respect it shows for the intelligence of its audience, adult and child alike. The provocative themes of films from Finding Nemo to Ratatouille are often more resonant than anything you see in live action; the jokes are organic and rarely easy. And remarkably, their respect is rewarded big-time at the box office. Pixar not only creates Disney’s most creative films, but its most lucrative.

On paper, Wall-E looks like the most challenging Pixar film yet. Set (initially) on a depressingly bleak future Earth abandoned by humans and covered in waste, told almost entirely without dialogue, this is not The Little Mermaid. But the title character is such a lovable misfit (reminiscent of E.T. in both his appearance and his curious fumblings) that it might not be such a gamble after all.

The first half or so of Wall-E, both emotionally and particularly visually, is some of the most ground-breaking and powerful work Pixar has done. Wall-E’s plight — the last “living” thing (apart from a cockroach friend) on Earth, doomed to stack garbage for eternity — is a dreary one, but he responds with admirable pluck. Clinging to found treasures (a Rubick’s cube, an egg beater) and obsessing over the romantic scenes in his VHS copy of Hello Dolly, he is aching for somebody to love.

Enter EVE, a very high-tech robot who descends to scan the planet for signs of life. It’s love at first sight for Wall-E, though Eve takes a little while to come around. Their courtship is the film’s central, and most successful, plot line, highlighted by scenes of aching beauty (an outer space pas de deux comes immediately to mind).

In its second half, the film shifts to a giant outer space cruise liner, where humanity has been reduced to gelatinous blobs who never leave their mechanized armchairs and communicate solely through computer screens. There is some biting satire about American life in this section, but it is a step down in quality for the film, treading the more familiar ground of Monsters Inc., with which it shares a clever future-pop aesthetic and a few manic chase scenes. It also descends ever so briefly into an unbecoming preachiness.

This second-half stumble reduces Wall-E to a very solid movie that sits somewhere in the middle of the Pixar pack but leaves you wondering how truly special it could have been.