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January 06, 2010
WALL*E: Resistance is futile
I am, as usual, way behind the movie-viewing curve. I finally got around to seeing WALL*E, the improbably charming robot-love story from the geniuses at Disney/Pixar, thanks to friends who loaded the Blu-Ray disc into the PS3 and essentially told me to "Siddown an' shaddap!"
The first 30 minutes of WALL*E are brilliant, and practically wordless, remarkably evocative, touching and completely immersive. The animators have produced a photo-realistic world -- a ravaged, abandoned, fantastical-yet-familiar world -- like nothing I'd ever seen before, and populated it with two sentient beings ... joined soon after by a third.
The animators change the look of the film when the story leaves Earth behind, shifting to a day-glo palette and "traditional" computer-animated visual style when the main characters (and the audience) arrive aboard the deep-space transport (and interstellar cruise ship) "Axiom." If the remainder of the film doesn't quite live up to the promise of the first half, it's simply because the bar had been set so high. I would've been perfectly happy to have spent the rest of the story in the company of WALL*E, EVE and a cockroach on a deserted, desiccated and dilapidated planet, but then I'm not even close to normal (as my family will surely confirm).
WALL*E was as good as my friends had promised; if you've not yet seen it, pick up a copy. And if you've already succumbed to its charms, check out the promotional video, above, extolling the features of Buy N Large's latest technical innovation.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 6, 2010 01:59 AM
Comments
Pixar did it again with "Up." A similarly wordless love story that is sweet and will just bout break your heart.
And the kid doing the voice work for the "boy scout" is just spot on.
Posted by: BlogDog at January 7, 2010 10:11 PM
Ooops. I forgot you already looked at "Up." Sorry 'bout that chief.
Posted by: BlogDog at January 7, 2010 10:15 PM
No need to apologize; I still haven't seen anything more than the four-minute intro to "Up" posted below.
Posted by: Mike Lief at January 7, 2010 10:20 PM