Even for Pixar, this might be a first: an animated film that contains not only a fully realized world as photorealistic as it is full of wonder, but also the Gargantuan themes and visuals of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the stripped-down sad-clown pathos found in classic Buster Keaton comedies, and one of the most moving and simply unique love stories in a long time. Director Andrew Stanton kicked up the visual acuity of an already-stellar Pixar Animation Studios in 2003 with a reflective, refractive, color-shimmery realization of the oceanic world of FINDING NEMO, which genuinely felt as though it spanned the entire earth. With WALL-E, Stanton replaces an apprehensively fishy estranged journeyer with a love-struck and curious robotic one, allowing the quest for eternal love to expand from a desolate, dust-covered, palpably polluted future Earth and into an even more mysterious abyss: the far reaches of outer space.
With virtually no dialogue, WALL-E's neatly contained vaudevillian first act eerily and tragically introduces the robot of the title as the last living thing on Earth (aside from a little cockroach friend) amidst dilapidated skyscrapers and equally tall compacted trash heaps. WALL-E has developed a tender and inquisitive personality doing what he was built to do day in and day out for the past 700 years--allocate and dispose of human waste--simply because no one turned him off when the human race left the hostile polluted planet. When the directive-oriented Eve robot comes crashing into his life from above, WALL-E immediately becomes infatuated with her, and is willing to follow her to back into dangerous outer space, where two robots gliding through the ether, dancing via fire-extinguisher propulsion, are among the many memorable and grandly romantic moments of an expansively beautiful, deceptively simple story.
Review 1:
4 stars out of 4 -- "[E]ngaging and visually stunning....WALL-E is inventive, poignant and funny in its tale of a spunky robot whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class."
Source: USA Today
06/27/2008
Review 2:
"Pixar's latest is wonderful and full of wonder....Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, WALL-E gains strengths from embracing contradictions..."
Source: Los Angeles Times
06/27/2008
Review 3:
"WALL-E surely breaks new ground....It is also a disarmingly sweet and simple love story, Chaplinesque in its emotional purity."
Source: New York Times
06/27/2008
Review 4:
"[P]uckishly inventive, altogether marvelous....It whisks you to a new world, then makes that world every inch our own." -- Grade: A
Source: Entertainment Weekly
p.48 07/11/2008
Review 5:
"[E]xceptionally good. In fact it's one of Pixar's best films....The film's joy, though, is the way WALL-E's situation develops in an organic, lyrical, musical way."
Source: Sight and Sound
p.81 08/01/2008
Review 6:
5 stars out of 5 -- "WALL-E is a character of genius, as wondrous an example of the potential of animation as you will ever see."
Source: Empire
42 08/01/2008
Review 7:
4 stars out of 4 -- "Animation art at its highest level....You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic."
Source: Rolling Stone
p.99 08/07/2008
Review 8:
"Just watching WALL-E putter around earth by himself, crushing trash into neat cubes and listening to his homemade tape of the HELLO, DOLLY! soundtrack is mesmerizing."
Source: Premiere
06/26/2008