"WALL-E (Waste Allocation Lift Loader (Earth-class)), is a small robot who has spent the seven centuries since mankind’s departure from earth doing what he was programmed to do; compress the garbage and waste materials left behind into easy to stack cubes. He’s been doing it for so long you can imagine how bored he is. His only company is a cricket, and his only pleasures are finding weird and wonderful things – Rubik's cube, light bulbs, gnomes, a VHS tape of Hello, Dolly! – in among the debris and taking them back to his shack.
"One day, out of the sky, a space ship descends and a smart, white female droid which hovers and doesn’t touch the ground, is left behind. She’s called EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), and she’s here to forage for signs of life to take back to the mother ship where the humans are living awaiting the time to return home. Wall-E has never seen anything so lovely before and, as much out of loneliness as out of love, follows her everywhere. Eventually, she befriends him, but on the point of Wall-E becoming a very happy robot, the mother ship returns and takes her with it, but Wall-E, in desperation, hitches a lift and so begins the adventure of his life.
"Disney had long had a reputation for anthropomorphizing the behavior of animals, but Pixar had been doing so for inanimate objects for years. There had been animated films on the subject of artificial intelligence before, most notably the forgettable Robots, but Wall-E blows that and most other animated films out of the water. It’s a staggering achievement. Many will scoff at the rather straightforward story, and yet one does wonder if they truly realize who the target audience is here.
"This visionary animated film that may well be regarded one day as one of the greatest of all animated features, stretches the boundaries of the form, and of art in general. This science-fiction parable/love story is wrought in the mold of Spielberg’s E.T., but it’s a film that echoes the silent era in its post-apocalyptic extended early sequence. The film’s soaring emotional center is the robot trash compactor “WALL-E’s” infatuation with songs from the film Hello Dolly! and the later relationship with his counterpart, Eve. The music played around the captain – Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, all very Kubrickian – and the idea of the ship’s computer being Ellen Ripley are splendidly integrated.
"The film has its level of cynicism, and there’s a hopelessness that recalls A.I. Technically and in its painstaking attention to detail it may well be the most accomplished of animated films. It is an exhilarating film of great physical beauty and wonderment, yet like all great art, its heartbreak is palpable. The voice work and Thomas Newman’s score are first-rate, but the lion’s share of the credit must go to director Andrew Stanton, who made a film of extraordinary depth, bringing together an arsenal of cinematic resources, and shooting a laser beam to the very center of the human heart." ~ Sam Juliano
This year's "nominees:"
Happy-Go-Lucky (dir. Mike Leigh)
Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)
Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman)
WALL*E (dir. Andrew Stanton)
Wendy and Lucy (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
And for the morbidly curious, click here for complete results of our Best Picture voting ten years ago. (SPOILER: WALL*E was our winner then as well.)
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