Has anyone checked IMDB’s list of the Greatest Films of All-Time lately?
Such gaudy praise will inevitably trigger the defense mechanisms of angry film fanatics, but I have to admit, I went to this film in a group of about thirty people, and not a single one of us walked away with the slightest negative word to utter about it. Besides, once you’re talking about a Top 250 Films of All-Time list, you’re really just splitting hairs — is Cuckoo’s Nest really a better film than Casablanca? How does one compare Schindler’s List to Star Wars? The answer is, who cares, if a movie is on this list — no matter how much we can rightfully rip on the average IMDB user’s knee-jerk leanings towards newer films — it is prrrrobably great movie.
After the jump, my thoughts on WALL-E — SPOILER ALERT: I write out in detail every single visual gag in the film:
As I mentioned, I went to see the movie with literally about 30 people; we had an email chain of Pixar nerds all buying our tickets in advance for Friday night, then found out that an entire other group of people we knew was doing the same thing, then a bunch of friends of friends kept getting looped in, and ultimately, we just had this giant chunk of seats in the center of the 19th Street AMC filled with overeager twentysomethings aggressively anticipating this G-rated film. The entire theater, actually, was filled with almost exclusively 20 and 30 year olds, with zero parents or children; I feel like, after a decade of my kind being priced out of Manhattan by an elder generation of parents with New York incomes, it’s nice to see we can still mobilize and stick it back to their children by Fandango-ing them out of opening weekend movie tickets. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
The previews for the film, expectedly but perhaps ironically, included trailers for Madagascar II and How Was This Not Made In 1997 Chihuahua, and while both were intended to appeal to the cartoon-loving kiddie crowd one would expect at a G-rated film, they were greeted with audible, haughty snark from a community with a shared disdain for hapless Pixar wannabes.
As for the film itself, many aspects of the critical praise are thoroughly evident — yes it’s a great love story, yes the visual gags are superb — but few critics have really talked about just how dark the film’s vision of the future is. The concept of overweight, immoble citizens in a state of constant computer-aided lethargy was about as believably bleak as any “crazy future” movies I’ve ever seen (perhaps short of Idiocracy). More striking was the fact that none of the citizens were consciously, sinfully lazy — over time, they’d become adapted to a world streamlined to a fault, and they weren’t stupid, they just literally did not possess knowledge about basic aspects of life that had been de-emphasized out of their lives. This was a frickin’ G-RATED MOVIE, people, and we’re talking about concepts more plausible and troubling than, like, The Road Warrior.
One friend of mine did comment that the animation “wasn’t really a step up” from the rest of the Pixar canon, but I couldn’t disagree more; besides the gradual improvement of certain details (hair, human facial features, etc), I’ve never viewed the successive Pixar films as a linear upward-trending graph of better and better animation, but, rather, with each individual film representing the studio’s attempt to conquer a particular atmosphere — the ocean, the streets of Paris, a towering Gotham-like metropolis, and now, outer space and crazy computery future world. There’s simply no way a live-action film could’ve emphasized a society fully dependant on computer-run computers more adeptly than this film did.
I don’t really feel like spending time debating whether or not WALL-E belongs where it does on that IMDB list, not only because quantifying greatness is often a joyless exercise, but also because this film specifically was so universally likable, unpretentious, and innocent, I can’t imagine anyone not coming away from it happy in the most complete way any film could provide.
Sometimes, overwhelming universal praise isn’t the product of some collaborative hype-machine or a pack-mentality attraction to a “next big thing.” Sometimes, great movies are just great.
