Pixar does it again with Wall-E

A garbage cleaning robot suddenly finds himself in a space adventure to save the planet

Wall-E
Director: Andrew Stanton
Voiced by: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard,
Rating: ***1/2
 
Of all the recent mankind-at-peril films (The Happening, I Am Legend), Wall-E has to be the cutest. The story is a familiar one: Earth has been abandoned by the humans because it has become too polluted, and the last few have taken off in a spacecraft to find greener pastures in the galaxy. Life on the planet is on the brink of extinction, and it's up to one person - in this case, a robot - to try and save it.

So we see Wall-E, a garbage compacting robot that someone forgot to turn off when the humans left, sifting through skyscraper-high piles of trash, compressing them into neat building blocks and sometimes taking back a few trinkets that catch his fancy. Wall-E doesn't realise he can stop doing what he has for several centuries, even though Earth has emptied out.

He doesn't question his desolate surroundings and barely notices when holographic images pop up showing how a multinational called Buy n Large (BnL) took over the planet and generated so much trash that there was no place left for humans.

He doesn't find it weird that he and his cockroach buddy (sweeter, less precocious than the inhabitants of Joe's Apartment) are the only moving things in a vast landscape of litter. Till one day a search-droid called Eve drops in on him and changes his world. An unlikely romance blooms between the rickety, splattered Wall-E and sleek Eve. Together they must try and save the planet, green it, and bring back the humans who have been roaming in space for hundreds of years.
 
The computer wizards at Pixar have outdone themselves. To make a film almost completely without dialogue and still hold your attention with just the visuals, is no mean feat. For the first 40 minutes of Wall-E,the film's track has only robotic whirrs, clicks and beeps (including Wall-E's courtship rituals with Eve).

But the world that unfolds all around the robots is a magnificent one. Through a haze of dust and muted sunlight, we see a country laid to waste - huge dumpsters, hollowed-out malls and apartments, dust storms rising - in almost symphonic detail, ominous in its matter-of-factness.

The buildings simulate the familiar New York skyline, but as 'camera' zooms in, they reveal themselves to be piles and piles of compact garbage blocks in the shape of the Chrysler building (at this point, I even heard a gasp in the audience - testimony to Pixar's superbly realistic rendition).
 
The film begins to flag - and becomes predictable - when it comes to the humans. Director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) throws in some sure-shot funnies: A rag-tag bunch of 'reject bots' who cut loose from a robotic madhouse and run amok; humans made overweight and lazy by having everything done for them; a mutinous robot crew, led by Auto the auto pilot, who refuse to take orders from the humans. Still, Stanton brings a light touch - and some heart - to these oft-repeated themes. At the end of the hour and a half, you might find yourself transfixed.
 
l_ghosh@dnaindia.net