Wall-E

It's finally time for us to get around to do a review of the latest film by Pixar Animation Studios, Wall-E. Having read a very long article over at the Harvard Business Review written by the President of Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, on how Pixar fosters creativity, we had a better idea of where Pixar was coming from with their latest foray into feature-length animated films. In short they're not afraid to take wacky ideas and play around with them.

The premise behind Pixar's ninth film, and the second released since they were bought by Disney in January of 2006, is that a lowly robot, the eponymous Wall-E, is tasked with cleaning up a post-apocalyptic Earth. He then meets and falls in love with another robot, Eve. Before we even screened the film, we had serious concerns about how Pixar could take this concept and make it work when there clearly couldn't be much in the way of dialogue. While the trailer showed humourous sight gags of Wall-E and Eve, we doubted that these could carry a whole film for an hour and a half.

Having actually seen the film, we were right in having been concerned about the lack of dialogue. The first half hour, while entertaining, was a bit on the slow side. Things picked up a little once they made it into space, however. The lack of a clear villain in this film meant that there was very little in the way of dramatic tension. Also, we strongly dislike it when a film tries to moralise to us, which we felt this one tried to do.

Being Pixar gave birth to the now very-prolific artform of feature-length computer animated films, we had expected them to lead the field in this area. With Wall-E, we weren't disappointed. There's a reason why their first eight films grossed an average of $240 million at the American box office ($540 million internationally) and Wall-E is tracking to hit just under this level. Wall-E (the film) is beautifully rendered and at times it's easy to forget that this was all done with computer animation. When Toy Story came out in 1995, they had apologised for the lack of realistic looking humans in it. The animation in Wall-E shows just how far Pixar has come in the past thirteen years, and how much the other studios still need to go to catch up.

In conclusion, Wall-E is a very solid film produced by a studio that has had nothing but solid hits. While the story is slow at points and could have easily been told in a half hour, the stunning visuals and sight gags help fill in the weaknesses of this film. We at FilmQuest give this film a very positive 7 out of 10 QuestMarks.

With Pixar's next five films being Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Newt (2011), The Bear and the Bow (2011) and Cars 2 (2012), it looks like they have a rather full slate of films ahead of them. We can only hope that they don't become a victim of their own success and that the quality of their films remains high. We also hope that they don't get too wacky with their storylines (which they were in danger of doing with their last two films) and alienate their audiences. Pixar does like to gamble, but can even their Midas touch last much longer? Only time will tell.