Wall-E

Only somewhat surprisingly, one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Pixar has hit the right balance of many elements, including humor, cynicism, adventure, love story, post-apocalypse, utopia/dystopia, satire, and any number of other themes you might care to add. I enjoyed it because of the grand sci-fi epic-type story arch - the ruined Earth / survival in space / Great Return to Earth just has a great romantic shape.

The facial and vocal expressions of the robots were well done - this was probably the key to making the entire movie work. The Pixar animators must have learned so much by now about the symbolic representation of emotions that they are probably in a position to inform modern psychology a bit. By this point they should be able to animate a happy pencil, a disgruntled banana, a nervous tractor, or any other wholly weird combination of emotion and typically-inanimate object.

The cautionary-tale aspect is timely yet hopeful: we may ruin our planet and render it uninhabitable for centuries, but perhaps not forever. Actually, the reality may be more like: we may render the planet uninhabitable for ourselves - yet other life on Earth will be fine and continue long after we perish. Alright, so that wouldn't have been as upbeat and Disney an ending.... It could have been the plant was one of a new species that had adapted to the toxic, perhaps radioactive atmosphere, and when humans returned they found that only these new superplants, along with cockroaches, were the only things which could live on Earth.... Happy happy.

Satirical aspects were interesting as well. I can imagine a young child in the theater: Mommy, why does everyone look like Uncle Tod? Similarly, the BnF (was that it?) mega-corporation was a different take on Resident Evil's Umbrella Corporation, or Alien's Weyland-Yutani or The Company or so on and so forth.... You know, a few years back, the number one target of megacompany / mass-produced / anti-mom-and-pop angst was probably Wal-Mart. This was perhaps when the storyline for this film was being written... by any chance was Wall-E meant to be Wal-Mart's robot?? And how will we feel when Best Buy and Price Club and Wal-Mart carry this DVD later on in the year, and most likely promote it to sickening excess, maybe around the holiday season? For that matter, would this movie rub a fat audience member the wrong way? Does it make people feel guilty, or at least self-conscious, about being stationary for two hours while gorging on popcorn and high-fructose corn syrup? Hmmm....

All in all, what a well-done film... a unique cross-genre story that would be a good companion movie to I Am Legend, Final Fantasy, the Short Circuit series, etc.

...Yes, too bad they couldn't have inserted a favorite recurring image/theme of mine: life on Earth has adapted, and has taken our ruined cities, littered with husks of skyscrapers, and covered them all in green and buried all memories of us away (imagery from many stories of mine - one here)... and our descendent survivors lament the folly of their ancestors in making the Earth pass us by... But no film can be perfect.