Cynical Cinema

I am going to start this review with a bold statement.  WALL-E is the best animated movie…of all time.  Yes, it’s better than Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and any other animated fare for kids.   Or adults, or anything.  It is 2001:  A Space Odyssey for children.  For kids, in the sense that it makes sense.  Not only that, I would go one step further and suggest that Pixar has become the greatest studio for animated film in history, outclassing Disney.  Just look at their output:  The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and now WALL-E.  (They have had one movie that missed being a classic - Cars, which was just a little too formulaic to be great.)

The fact that this movie was green-lit at all is a testament to the Kubrick-esque power that Pixar commands in Hollywood.  Imagine trying to pitch this to investors:  It’s a movie for kids about a little robot who is alone on Earth, compacting garbage.  He learns Earth culture through an old VHS tape he’s found that plays Hello Dolly, the 1969 musical.  Through this video, he learns about love, dancing and companionship.  In the 97 minute movie, there is a total of about six minutes of actual dialogue.  Not only that, the entire film is a rumination on the current human condition, our tendency toward apathy, and the idea that through our own laziness we are destroying our own future world.

When the movie begins, it has been 700 years since humans abandoned the Earth, on a massive spaceship that just seems to float endlessly through space.  We meet the humans much later in the film, and when we do they are fat, useless blobs, floating around in chairs and being waited on hand and foot by robots who meet their every need.  In the meantime, we meet WALL-E, (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter - Earth class), who lives alone on the Earth cleaning up our garbage.  The waste human beings have left behind is piled sky high, and it’s WALL-E’s job to crush it into cubes and stack it up.  By now, he has managed to stack massive piles of garbage throughout a city, piles that are as tall as the skyscrapers that still exist on the skyline, and piles that are eerily similar in shape.

What WALL-E doesn’t know is that he is completely alone, abandoned by the people and the robots who run the spacecraft, and who are never planning to go back.  He is cleaning up the Earth for no real reason, except that this is what he is programmed to do.  His lone companion is a little cockroach, who has managed to survive in the filth and through the devastation, as only a cockroach could.  When another robot suddenly appears on Earth, WALL-E is overjoyed.  Even though this new robot, EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) can fly, and has a gun on her arm that can blow up battleships, WALL-E is so happy to have someone who might provide companionship that he overcomes his fear to make some advances toward EVE.

WALL-E’s idea of “love” having come from Hello Dolly, he just wants to hold hands with EVE, although she is rather cold to the idea - it is not in her programming to hold hands or befriend anyone.  And when WALL-E presents her with a plant, a real, green, actually growing plant from Earth, she snatches it from him and shuts down.  This is her protocol - to search the Earth for any signs of vegetation, and bring them back to the spaceship.  This leads to an amazing series of events that ends with the two robots back in the space station, trying to snap the humans out of their apathy and fighting against the autopilot - (a computer with a big red light for an eye, in a direct tribute to 2001:  A Space Odyssey). 

There are three things that make WALL-E better than any other animated film in history.  First, the animation itself is beyond superb.  The world in which WALL-E lives (the abandoned Earth) is incredibly realized, and so staggeringly realistic that within minutes you forget entirely that you’re watching an animated movie.  This is the pinnacle of Pixar’s achievement to this time, and can likely be attributed to Roger Deakins, an incredibly cinematographer who was hired on to this project as a consultant.  Secondly, the characters.  The robots here, especially WALL-E, seem more human than humans.  Their facial expressions and the noises they make are more evocative than any real “dialogue” could be.  And the fact that the kids in the theatre around me didn’t even notice that no one was talking is a testament to how effective this really is.  They were completely focussed on this movie, beginning to end.

And thirdly, this is a message movie.  A movie that teaches kids (and adults) about the dangers of apathy, the path upon which we human beings currently find ourselves, mass commericalization, and the dangers of ignoring environmental problems.  The movie never once strays off message for the sake of a cheap joke, as so many animated movies do.  It never deviates from it’s greater purpose, and the vision is so consistent throughout the film that even when it isn’t obvious, we can’t forget.

All in all, WALL-E is a breathtaking, awe-inspiring achievement that will get kids to question the world around them, and that’s a good thing.  It feels in a lot of ways like one of those Pixar short films, extended to feature length.  The two cute robots that fall in love could easily be a three-minute short.  But instead, every moment in WALL-E is as good as the best moment in a short, and that makes this the greatest animated movie of all time.  Watch it.  Now.

Harold and Kumar will soon be going to Guantanamo Bay, on the big screens. So it would only make sense that Alliance Films would release the original movie, yet again, in time for the new film to hit theatres. Whitecastle, for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time in the States, is a burger joint that sells these cute little square hamburgers that are delicious. The name-dropping in the title of this movie is not (I am assuming) some kind of nefarious product placement, it is merely an indication of the love that the counter-culture in the U.S. has for this particular fast-food chain. (The Beastie Boys have referenced Whitecastle several times over the course of their career.) It is the ultimate stoner fast food, and fat guys like me love it as well because we can eat eleven or twelve burgers at a time. The reference to Whitecastle in the title of this film is more an indication of the popularity of the chain among the stoner crowd, and not a random fast-food selection at all. Harold And Kumar go to McDonalds? No. Burger King? Don’t think so. Wendy’s? Please. Were it not Whitecastle, Big Kahuna Burger might be the only other place that would make sense.

And there is set the tone of the film. Yes, there have been hundreds, even thousands, of these irritating teen-stoner comedies. Or college-stoner comedies, or young-man-in-a-boring-job stoner comedies. But few of them have been as funny as this one. There are definitely stupid, pointless and terrible moments. Riding a cheetah? The old guy with the sores on his face? Come on. Horrible stuff in an otherwise excellent movie. What makes Harold and Kumar work are the stars, Kal Penn (who was recently very, very good in The Namesake and very, very bad in Van Wilder The Rise of Taj) and John Cho, (who was really irritating as the “MILF” guy in American Pie, and has been very good in small TV roles ever since). The chemistry between Penn and Cho is terrific, and they come off as our buddies. We all know guys just like this. Guys who are great, regular, fairly boring guys in everyday life, but who become a little crazy when the idea of getting stoned enters their head on the weekends. They are not the totally useless stoners who sit on their couches and eat Doritos and barely get up when you come over, but rather the ultimate weekend warriors who want to think weed is their way of life, but are wrong. They are stoner-poseurs. Or, at least, Cho is.

So the quest, while it begins as a search for Whitecastle, turns into a search for weed, which then becomes a hunt for girls, and then an escape from the law, and then returns, full circle, to Whitecastle. And while there are the obligatory gross-out jokes (battlesh**s), and the over-the-top moments (hang-gliding), it’s the little things that make this movie better than average. Doogie Howser - Neil Patrick Harris - shows up. As himself. With cocaine and hookers. And he steals their car. An inspired bit of casting. The scenes with John Cho trying to avoid the young woman his family wants him to date are perfect in their realism and simplicity. And the writing of the dialogue between the two stars is bang-on. This new Extreme! Unrated! Edition! is really nothing new. The special features are actually more juvenile than the movie, with the exception of a “back-seat” interview with Cho and Penn. And for those who are Harold and Kumar fanatics (you know who you are, ya stoners) there is a pretty extensive sneak peek at the upcoming Guantanamo film. If you’ve already seen this movie, don’t bother. If you haven’t, at least this gives you the chance to do so again. Just be ready to totally shut off your brain.