Wall-E

Pixar has done it again. After last years cooking rat in Ratatouille, the mouse house has returned with another modern animated classic. Last year at San Diego Comic Con they had an event where Ben Burtt, the sound effects guru for Lucasfilm, demonstrated the new effects for the latest Pixar film. Now this guy Ben Burtt has been around for a long time. He has worked on all of the Star Wars films, all of the Indiana Jones films, Dark Crystal, Willow, E.T., Munich and now Wall-E. This is the guy who created the sounds for R2-D2 in Star Wars, and now he's taking these talents to Pixar to create the first animated hero that mostly talks in beeps a blips and is only capable of saying his name.Wall-E was really a fun film from start to finish. The first forty minutes reveal so much about his character and the environment he is placed in without the trappings of any dialogue, except for his TV and various electronic gadgets that speak. It's truly amazing what they were able to do with so little. Wall-E is a trash compactor droid that is supposed to clean up this dusty and crap filled earth until the humans return to reclaim the empty planet. Wall-E is the only compactor droid still operating and over time he has developed emotions and the strongest one is isolation and loneliness. His only friend is what has to be the cutest cockroach I have ever seen.Wall-E finally gets some company when a mean machine lady robot named Eve starts digging around his stash looking for soil samples. Wall-E falls instantly in love with her and he ends up following her to the last Earth vessel. Now throughout the film we get a taste of the Earth before the fall. The Earth it seems was completely controlled by corporations and the President of Earth, Fred Willard, doing his best George W. Bush. The humans are fat and lazy sitting in floating chairs that take them everywhere they need to go. They are completely helpless without computers and droids. This kind of reminded me a bit of that movie Idiotcracy by Mike Judge that came out a few years ago. It was critically panned and yes it was a stupid movie, but there was some brilliance there in the foreshadowing of our nation becoming too lazy and too unmotivated to do even the simplest task.Wall-E is a light hearted thoughtful animated film and if you have kids between the ages of 3 and 35 they are going to love it.

Grade: 4 Buckets