WALL•E
The Small Screen
By: Red Vaughn
As a parent, you’re treated to hours and hours (and hours) of animated flicks of varying degrees of skill. Some CGI is so hideously cheap in appearance that it’s almost excruciating to watch. You want to hide your tot’s eyes before they are scarred by the appalling weightlessness of digitally shiny animals spouting off with gratingly high-pitched voices. Refreshingly, with Pixar films, you know that won’t be the case. The quality of animation is never in question, and the storylines are excellent enough to hold up under the foreseeable repetition. WALL•E is no exception to that. The sheer mastery of the animation itself, the way everything looks faultlessly real, the knack for capturing the smallest gestures of life, is almost terrifying when you think of the craft that went into it. Pixar has found a way to make whatever they imagine seem real (kind of like God, only a Hydra). It’s frightening, then, that what they chose to imagine this time around is possibly the bleakest setting for a story since Pink Floyd’s The Wall. (Hmm . . . Another Brick in the WALL•E? Coincidence? I think not.) WALL•E is a robot whose directive is to clean up the garbage-infested Earth that humans abandoned 700 years earlier when it became uninhabitable. In the meantime, peoplekind have become jelly-like slugs who ride around on hover chairs and ingest soda-like drinks while mindlessly watching viewscreens. You can’t fault Pixar for shooting an arrow at responsibility and morality like that—kids this the big-eyed WALL•E is a compelling little robot—but it’s dang hard to watch as a grown-up. Maybe it’s the same sort of uncomfortable that Idiocracy induced—the feeling of inevitable actuality, the inevitable spiral. Whatever the case, the DVD comes in a three-disc set with a full disc of extras and a digital copy, for those who want to see how it’s all done. (Red Vaughn)
Disney-Pixar, 98 minutes
Available: November 18
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