Wall-E
Went to see Wall-E last night, with
alextfish and
isa62v4. I'd been very much looking forward to seeing it, and I'd heard it had good reviews, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to. It was quite fun, but I much preferred all the other Disney/Pixar films.
First, the good things. I was very impressed with the quality of the animation, especially in the early scenes with Wall-E wandering around the rubbish tips and playing with his toys. Because there weren't any obvious cartoony people (or fish, fluffy monsters, or egregiously anthropomorphic cars) and everything on screen was man-made, I found myself forgetting for occasional moments that it wasn't live-action. A computer-generated dirty Rubik's cube looks much the same as a real dirty Rubik's cube. The real live-action footage Wall-E played from videotape didn't look silly or out-of-place, like it probably would have done against a very cartoony background.
I also liked - well, maybe liked is the wrong word - the people on the Axiom and their way of life. That was done well - both disturbing and plausible. It reminded me a bit of Brave New World - they're happy, but you don't want to end up like them[1]. And I liked the captain and his rebellion against it all.
[1] It just occurred to me: I know someone whose view of Brave New World is "what's wrong with that?" I'm really curious to find out whether he'll have the same reaction to life on board the Axiom.
Now the things I didn't like. Maybe I'm more of a verbal person than most, but I can't engage with characters who don't talk, or who only have a vocabulary of three words. Wall-E communicates about as much as Abu, Aladdin's pet monkey. Both have expressive faces and bodies, and both vocalise in a wide range of tones of voice, and both occasionally approximate real words, but you can't have a conversation with them. This works fine for a hero's sidekick like Abu, but Aladdin is primarily about the human characters, and would have been severely lacking if it were called Abu and followed the adventures of the monkey as he scavenged in the marketplace. As would Finding Nemo if it had consisted of Marlin swimming around going "Neee-mooo! Neee-mooo!" and not having interesting, funny or moving conversations with Dory, the sharks, and the sea turtles.
The non-verbalness reminded me of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or perhaps one of Pixar's own shorts. (
isa62v4 suggested it might have begun life as a short, and got expanded into a feature-length film.) Both of these are cartoons I enjoy - they're very entertaining ways to spend five minutes. But I'd get bored if they went on for an hour and a half.
Analysing this further, maybe I'm just being a bit of a linguistic chauvinist, finding it hard to believe that anything that doesn't use language can be sentient or be a person. Compare Johnny Five (who Wall-E looks very similar to - I wonder whether Disney/Pixar bought the rights to do that?) He talks, and I find it much easier to empathise with his emotions than with Wall-E's.
Another issue was the scientific and technological goofs, like getting the plant out in outer space and it surviving the exposure unharmed. It feels a bit churlish to quibble at these in a Disney film, but they did grate a bit.
alextfish made the ingenious suggestion that the robots should be thought of not as programmed pieces of electronics, but as genetically engineered artificial lifeforms. This would make many things more plausible: their development of personality (obviously this on its own could be excused, since it happens with all fictional robots ever), their tendency to mimic things they see and hear (which creatures do naturally, but which is difficult to program machines to do, so wouldn't be programmed without a reason), and the way they communicate with each other by sight and sound and typing on keyboards, rather than some kind of direct networking.
There were definitely subtle, clever, and funny moments (and plenty of digs at society and comsumerism, yay). But I didn't feel they were enough to carry the whole film: as well as the non-talking issue (which I realise is probably just me) I felt it dragged at times and seemed a bit thin in terms of plot.