by Beth Szczepanski

Created on: July 11, 2008   Last Updated: July 13, 2008

I went to see Wall-E with very high expectations. All of the reviews I had seen just gushed over the movie's beautiful graphics, personable characters and intriguing plot. For the most part, I agree with all those positive reviews, but I feel that the movie does suffer a bit from the high expectations such universal acclaim brings.

Wall-E tells the story of a little solar powered trash-compacting robot, left behind to clean up the earth seven hundred years prior to the time of the movie. It seems that humanity has trashed the planet to such an extent that it can no longer support human life. While Wall-E the robot compacts trash and builds skyscrapers, he also develops a cute personality, curiously examining the artifacts left behind by mankind and collecting interesting items.

One such item is a small green plant, which proves that the earth might recover enough to once again support human life. The humans, it turns out, have all been living in a space station for the past seven hundred years. Without gravity, the humans have lost a lot of muscle and bone mass, and their slug-like forms float about the space station in hover chairs.

Eventually, the humans send a scout robot back to earth to check on the progress of plant life on earth. Wall-E becomes very attached to this robot, appropriately named "EVE," and when she returns to the human's space station, Wall-E goes with her. To avoid spoiling the film, I will not mention the remainder of the plot, but let's just say that the humans who had completely spoiled the earth seven hundred years prior have not particularly improved with the passing generations.

Wall-E's visual effects have all of the "wow" factor we have come to expect from Disney Pixar films. The decimated earth with its enormous skyscrapers of compacted junk appears eye-poppingly vast, atrocious yet wonderful at the same time. The space scenes likewise offer the expected visual treats. One of the most remarkable feats of visual effect, though, is the way that animators infused robots with real, touching emotional depth using only metallic facial expression.

The movie's plot also moves in fascinating ways. For the first third of the movie, there is no dialogue, just robotic mutters, beeps and pings. Even so, the plot is easy for even small children to follow and enjoy.

Overall, the movie is very dark in its assessment of humanity and the environment. It paints a truly bleak, but not entirely unbelievable, picture of our future. As such, this is the most politically daring Disney-Pixar film yet.

Still, this is a Disney-Pixar film, and it has been fitted with the requisite happy ending. I won't divulge that ending here, but it seemed to me terribly inconsistent with the tone and plot of the rest of the film. I felt that the ending fell flat, and was not nearly as satisfying as I had come to expect from reading glowing reviews and from seeing other Disney-Pixar films.

While Wall-E might fall a bit flat at the end, it is still a remarkable achievement for Disney-Pixar. They have delved into political territory usually avoided in big commercial children's films, they have managed to move audiences to root for a rusty, grimy but curiously endearing robot and they have delivered the glorious visual effects we have come to expect. This is a great movie for children and adults alike, but don't expect perfection!

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