‘wall-E’ Turns Animation On Its Head
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Forget Isaac Asimov’s famous Laws of Robotics. WALL·E’s biggest accomplishment may be defying the Laws of Computer Animation.
In a medium that has become formulaic — mix furry critters with celebrity voices, add a dash of pop-culture snark — the Disney/Pixar film has been praised for taking new risks.
Much has been made already of the film’s lack of dialogue, communicating its robot love story largely through pantomime.
“What makes it different is that it has a much darker vision than it looks like on the surface,” says Annalee Newitz, editor of the sci-fi website io9.com. “Some of the dystopian elements are between the lines, but if you watch carefully, you realize that all the humans on Earth are destroyed, Love Song implicitly.”
WALL·E filmmaker Andrew Stanton says that was a way to make the little robot lonely, so he’d be excited when the sleek vegetation-seeking probe EVE arrives to see if the planet is habitable again for the humans still alive aboard a distant space cruiser.
“I didn’t think it was scary. I thought it was sad,” Stanton says. “To me, the ultimate definition of futility is some machine doing its job for centuries and not knowing it was all a waste of time. As a storyteller, that’s gold.”
?Real man, computerized world. Love Song It used to be novel to add combine animation to live action (dancing penguins in Mary Poppins). Now, it’s surprising to see a flesh-and-blood Fred Willard, seen in video footage from centuries before, when the world was just beginning to die out.
Willard, known for Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, says he’s proud to be a live-action trailblazer, the first in a Pixar film. “I’m so glad it’s very successful. Then everyone is happy and they don’t second-guess what they could have done: ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have had Fred in it.
