A Love Story Out Of This World

The first half hour of WALL-E is essentially wordless, and left me speechless.

This magnificent animated feature from Pixar starts on such a high plane of aspiration, and achievement, that you wonder whether the wonder can be sustained. But yes, it can. The director, Andrew Stanton, supported by a special-forces battalion of artists, voice artists and computer wizards, has conjured up a tender, comical love story between two robots whose feelings for each other seem as nuanced and deep as any you're likely to encounter these days in live-action drama.

Better still, their story plays out in two disparate worlds that amount to a unified vision, stunning and hilarious in equal measure, of what we human creatures have been up to and where it could get us.
The hero's name is an acronym of his task: Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, thus WALL-E. He's a garbage compactor with a pair of swiveling binoculars for a head, a square metal body and twin tracks that make him look like a midget tank.

He was designed to stuff the discarded stuff of our consumer society into himself, squeeze it into dense cubes and stack the cubes into piles. By his own design, though, WALL-E has become, over time, an endlessly curious garbologist who collects objects that strike his fancy -- an eggbeater, a sheet of bubble wrap, a Rubik's cube, a paddle-ball, a Zippo lighter, a brassiere (he experiments with it by putting it over his eyes) a diamond ring in a velvet box (he tosses the ring and keeps the box).

And there's been plenty of time for his curiosity to evolve: WALL-E has been alone on Earth for seven centuries, ever since the last humans left and neglected to switch him off. It's become a commonplace of contemporary screenwriting classes that a movie must grab its audience within the first few minutes, if not seconds; that's why so many of them start with clichéd explosions, collisions or violent combat.

But no film-school formula could have envisioned the quietly magical pull of this film's opening sequence. The humor is so delectable, the images are so powerful, and darkly beautiful, and the music provides such a haunting counterpoint, that I'd love to describe the whole experience in minute detail. Best that you make your own discoveries, though. ("You" meaning adults and kids alike. This is a film for the ages -- just about all ages.)

Suffice it to say that WALL-E, whose forbears include diminutive personages from "Star Wars" and "Short Circuit," continues to toil like a half-pint Sisyphus in a bleak cityscape dominated by garbage -- most of it piled, presumably by him, into towers that might be mistaken for skyscrapers encrusted with barnacles.

He works, that is, until love blasts in from outer space in the person of a robot named EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). That she is a she is instantly clear. That she is just as clearly a person is a triumph of graphic design and enchanting animation, for EVE is a minimalist from the top of her levitating, ovoid head to the bottom of her conical abdomen, which doesn't need a leg to stand on because all of her levitates ever so lightly. (She is also one powerful female when the spirit moves her to unleash her laser gun.)

EVE's sleek white contours bespeak both egg and iPod. (Which is fitting, because whenever WALL-E reboots he emits an unmistakable Mac start-up sound.) Her facial features are limited to a pair of oval blue eyes behind a black oval screen, but those come-hither orbs are so expressive that WALL-E can't help but come with her, court her, protect her and finally follow her back to the galaxy whence she came.

At this point the story takes a new tack, expressed in a new palette -- colors close enough to Necco to be cheerful, but also borderline grotesque. And well they might be, since this is the big reveal about the fate of humankind, or what is left of it aboard a spaceship that resembles a giant cruise liner.

Most of the revelations are brilliant, both as satire and entertainment. Here again, though, you'll want to figure things out on your own, so I won't discuss EVE's animating program, which is rigidly simple until she overrides it, or WALL-E's role in regreening the earth, which is crucial, albeit inadvertent. But I will tell you that humankind's evolution, as foretold by Mr. Stanton and his colleagues, is a blissfully inspired reductio ad absurdum -- or more accurately inflatio ad absurdum -- of the ethos of consumption that now sustains the economies of prosperous nations.

Part of the genius of "WALL-E" is the seamlessness of its tone -- always entertaining, yet also polemic without being preachy. Heedless consumption is its satiric target, a healed planet is the locus of its hope. But the healing can't be achieved without bringing the consumption under control.

That point is tacitly made by the film's opening shot. Rows of wind turbines standing motionless beneath sulfurous skies announce that green technologies will avail us little if the planet is engulfed by flood tides of garbage. Still, hope carries the day in a fable that seems perfectly pitched for our times. (And carries it beyond the closing shot, in an end-title sequence that limns, as if on the Lascaux cave walls, humanity's return from its second childhood.)

Another contributor to the film's success is pervasive daring -- the daring of a pas de deux done in deep space by EVE, who leaves pale blue traces of her force field behind her wherever she swoops, and WALL-E, who's propelled by a small fire extinguisher's random squirts; of the integration, in the most rigorous sense, of beguiling show tunes from "Hello, Dolly!"; of a sensationally funny parody, involving the spaceship's captain, of the passage in "2001: A Space Odyssey" when an ape first stands on his hind legs; of an exquisite moment when, thanks to a security camera recording, EVE comes to understand how diligently WALL-E had protected her while she was shut down. ("Like caring for a loved one who's in a coma," a friend said after the screening.)

Indeed, how dare Andrew Stanton stop the whole enormous film in its tracks for a WALL-E-and-EVE version of the peerless scene in Chaplin's "City Lights" when the once-blind flower girl slowly recognizes the tramp? But stop it he does, and the scene takes your breath away. Who knew that you could be riveted by a robot's dead eyes?

Since the movie wasn't made by robots, it isn't perfect. The narrative might have done with much less of WALL-E and EVE being chased by robots we don't care about through the sterile environs of the space ship's innards. I found the use of Louis Armstrong's "La Vie en Rose" intrusive, since there's no grounding for it in the story.

And I was annoyed by the appearance, on a spaceship video screen, of Fred Willard as a frazzled captain of global industry urging the ship's captain and crew to "stay the course" -- not so much because of the reference to contemporary politics, though that seemed glib, but because a familiar actor's presence, however brief, impinges on the purity of the animation.

That said, the film stands as a stunning tour de force. The director has described it as his love letter to the golden era of sci-fi films that enchanted him as a kid in the 1970s. It is certainly that, in hearts and spades.

Beyond that, though, it's a love letter to the possibilities of the movie medium, and a dazzling demonstration of how computers can create a photorealistic world -- in this case a ruined world of mysterious majesty -- that leaves literal reality in the dust. I'll write more about this in Saturday's Weekend Journal, but for now I must drop my inhibitions about dropping the M word -- especially since I've already used magnificent -- and call "WALL-E" the masterpiece that it is.