Wall-E (2008)

Wall-E. When it comes to animation, Pixar rarely disappointed. Of course, some hit and miss are due to abound (I've never seen "Cars" for instance, and didn't really interested to see it in the near future) but as far as I'm concerned, given the premise (love story between robots and minimal dialog?), Wall-E delivers. The fact that this film arrives a month late to our local theater (as with most animation film out there) puzzled me a lot because this is a kind of holiday-family-film-thingy. I just hope they didn't prolonged "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" as well though of course, I think it is safe to assume so.

Welcome to the future. Earth's current inhabitant: One small cleaning robot, Wall-E. He was chosen by the nature to survive for 700 years and thus had developed some sort of curiosity and intelligence that I'm sure none of its original programmers were able to anticipate. Wall-E is a dedicated robot and lonely until suddenly, a robot, origin yet unknown, arrives from space. Her name is Eve and she quickly captures Wall-E's "heart". Together, they're bound to an adventure that led them to the last human civilization aboard the space fortress, Axiom.

It is easy to treat Wall-E, Eve, and any other robots featured in this film as a fully-equipped with human emotions robot through tiny gestures that once you passed the five minutes mark, you could forget that they're robots. Big kudos to the animators. From Wall-E's initial fear, Eve's exasperation and concerns, it is easy to imagine these robots as flesh-and-blood even if their purpose is still and intentionally remain alien and robotic. As absurd as it may sound, this is the best way to enjoy this film, sit back and relax, and stow away that trying-to-logicized-everything thoughts that you may have.

Finally, as a conclusion, even if the film had both subtle (HAL and Dave from 2001 made an appearance, although their names is not explicitly given, the resemblance is uncanny) and serious (ecological-greeny stuffs) messages, the unlikely courtship between Wall-E and EVE was more than enough to keep the viewers of all age hooked and interested. Of course, this film is not a sci-fi per se, therefore, its considerable lack of the "science" part (mostly involving space EVAs) are largely forgiven.

As we all know, Pixar is closely related to Apple, Eve's design should easily remind us to the white iPods and MacBooks but ultimately, the "bong" sound that greets every Mac OS X's user upon booting is quite palpable on at least two occasions. It doesn't really important, anyway just so you know. And there's a nod to the perhaps the only sound I would ever associated with space sci-fi films, "Also Sprach Zarathustra"

My rating: *** / **** - If I may, I would divide this film into two parts. Before and after Axiom. I luuvvvee the Before Axiom part, and frankly, the After Axiom part isn't really giving me other than the usual animation blather. But it's still good, though.