Film Review: Wall-E

    If someone were to tell you there is an animated movie about two robots who fall in love, you may have a hard time believing it. What's great about the film, is that it actually works. Here is the break down of the film if you have not gotten the chance to see it.

    We start looking over a waste land of earth and follow a single trash compacting robot named Wall-E through his daily routine. He collects unique things throughout his work and eventually finds a plant inside a shoe. After bringing it back to his home, a large spaceship lands on earth. Another robot comes out of it named eve. Eve finds the plant Wall-E took and goes into a stasis mode. Eve is flown back to the spaceship with the plant and wall-e sneaks onto the ship with her. They meet back with the mother ship and we see the new world humans are living in. The humans sit on hovering chairs, watch tv, and eat food throughout their journey in space. Wall-E travels among them as the plant reaches the captain. The captain sees that this is a way home and he attempts to bring the ship back to earth but is thwarted by the evil steering wheel robot. In the climax of the film, Wall-E saves the plant and the captain takes back control from the AI steering wheel. They go back to earth and replace the plant and grow it in order to restart the earth.

    Through spectacular cinema and animation, a touching and surprising love story between robots, Wall-E stands to be one the best robot centered animated movies. Though the story can move slow at times, the audience is swept off their feet by creative and fun storytelling along with beautiful animation from Pixar. 

    The idea of a robot love story is by far the most interesting aspect of the film. Although you would think it wouldn't work, it somehow does. Through human-like characteristics in the two robots such as Wall-E’s eye movements, the story comes together and you believe in their connection. Perhaps what makes this work so well is the fact that the human interactions we see throughout the film are so robotic. The film takes an interesting position of reversing the roles we're used to. They give the robots human-like characteristics and the humans robot-like characteristics. So maybe this is why we fall for robots in love, because it's that we expect to see human relationships but only see it clearly in the robots. 

    Pixar has a great history at making uninteresting or unconvincing things work. From a story about a fish lost in the ocean or journey of a bug as it saves its colony, Pixar has a way of convincing us through their beautiful story telling, no matter how obscure the premise.