#andrew stanton

“Computer, define dancing”

Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is undoubtedly Pixar’s boldest film to date. It has virtually no dialogue, and its main character is a robot stranded on a post-apocalyptic Earth. That’s a hell of a sell. But Pixar always seem to make it work, and, with WALL-E, the studio have created their greatest film to date – at least half of one.

The silent Earth sequences of the film are fantastic, fleshing out the charisma of WALL-E through a series of actions – keeping a cockroach as a pet, watching old romantic movies on an iPod, finding a diamond ring and being more impressed with the box. Every one of these moments add to his likeability, and helps set WALL-E up as a character to root for. Of course, we do, and this makes the central relationship of the film, between WALL-E and EVE, all the more satisfying – in fact, it’s one of the great modern romances, animated or otherwise, and this is surely down to the character of the little robot.

Sadly, once the characters leave Earth, WALL-E succumbs to the need to be accessible to children. Although it doesn’t go as far as, say, Up in this regard, the genericism of the film’s second half, particularly the “return to Earth” storyline, gets in the way of the great romance between the two leads. It is addressed (the “fire extinguisher spacewalk” is one of cinema’s most romantic animated sequences) but never with the same consistency or virtuosity as in the beginning. It’s a shame, but the bad never outweighs the good, and WALL-E is a consistently entertaining and highly imaginative film – it’s not Pixar’s best, but it’s certainly one of their better works.

It’s hard to deny that, given a free-rein, Pixar are capable of true greatness. But, for now, with the directors tightly reined in , we’ll just have to settle for films like WALL-E. And considering how good a film WALL-E is, that isn’t too much of an issue, is it?