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.

Don’t get me wrong.  Cheers was always great.  And season 10 contains some of the classic episodes the world has come to know and love.  Like the one where Sam, Cliff, Norm and Fraser go on a road trip to find their inner manliness, or the one where Norm and Cliff ruin Fraser’s therapy group.  Every actor is totally comfortable in their role, by this time they can do it in their sleep, and on occasion it seems as though they are.  But the indications that Cheers was nearing it’s end were there throughout the season.  And mainly, that’s as a result of the theme throughout the season where Sam and Rebecca decide to conceive a baby.

Not that the lame idea of the formerly promiscuous bartender and the uptight gold-digging whiner trying to have a child together can being down the entire series.  It can’t.  Cheers was just too good, and Norm and Cliff and Woody and Fraser and Carla and even Paul and Lilith made the series great regardless of the subject.  But where, in an earlier season, Sam’s romance with Diane was clearly going to be a fleeting one and was easily dismissed as Sam went back to his old ways, this time we feel as though it’s one of those will-they-or-won’t-they plots that could go on forever.  Like that Rachel and Ross thing that made Friends suck so very much.  Cheers is still hilarious, still way better than Friends, but Season Ten was the beginning of the end.  It comes out today, September 2nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Cheers is one of the very few shows from the 80s that actually stands the test of time. And season nine is out on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s in the midst of the Kirsty Alley years, back before she was a gigantic Jenny Craig spokesperson. As a child watching this show, I could not understand for the life of me why Sam Malone always wanted to sleep with Rebecca Howe. It confused me. I thought, this guy sleeps with every hot woman who walks into the bar! Why does he want the one who is fairly attractive at best? Not only that but she’s high-maintenance, she’s irritating, she’s kind of dumb, and she is a little mean. My mom explained that it was because he wanted the one woman he couldn’t have. At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought, the less effort the better, no? I understand better now, having succumbed to the same sort of mind set once or twice, but I still think it would be a lot better to just find a really hot girl with a great mind, like that one he meets every year on Valentine’s Day at that cabin in the woods, and go with it. Kirstey Alley seems like a lot of effort for very little return. But, that’s just me.

Season nine features some of the classic episodes of the series, like the one where Norm’s wife takes a job at the restaurant upstairs. In fact, the best part about season nine is the introduction of Keene Curtis, who plays John Allen Hill, the owner of Melville’s restaurant. His introduction leads to several great episodes where the ownership of the bathrooms in the back of Cheers come into question, and the feud between him and Sam reaches epic proportions. While Woody Harrelson and Kelsey Grammar are possibly the most successful actors to emerge from Cheers, it’s John Ratzenberger and George Wendt who kept the show outstanding. The ninth season was one of the best, and if you’re going to pick up one season on DVD, this is a good place to start.