I'm pretty much in awe of Pixar at this point. Forget the commercial success of their films. In the last decade plus, they've turned out a level of quality cinema that rivals the output of any studio you could mention. They're so far beyond their competitors that it's no longer a competition. I'm speaking not only in terms of story quality but somehow technology as well. Wall-E is the best looking computer-animated film I've ever seen.
A lot of critics have talked about the brilliance of the film's opening act, but this makes it seem as if the movie falls off in the latter parts. It doesn't. Not one iota. Andrew Stanton, the film's writer/director, doesn't sacrifice the poignancy of the early scenes with the ending's unbridled optimism. It felt like a natural conclusion to me. Stanton knows how to craft a tale. He showed that with Finding Nemo and cements it with Wall-E.
Everyone at Pixar knows the key to a great story and that's character development. Every film they make is character driven. Compare this to Dreamworks' most successful franchise: Shrek. The initial Shrek was a character driven story and by far the best of the series. After Shrek, the series devolved into a loose collection of pop culture references and sight gags held together by an extremely thin story. There was no growth of the core characters from one movie to the next. The creators way of expanding the story was to literally add more stock characters. And the result has been an unmemorable (and depressingly high-grossing) series of disposable celluloid candy.
Wall-E is equal parts love story and environmental cautionary tale. Stanton never lets either aspect overpower the other and that keeps the film from being too sentimental or pedantic. The social satire is fairly barbed for a kids' movie, but I loved it for being somewhat daring in that respect. It accomplishes what I think Mike Judge was trying to do with his little-seen film, Idiocracy, a film that had similar ideas and roughly the same message, but went about delivering it in a much more blunt (and subsequently less funny) manner.
Wall-E is the best film released theatrically so far this year. It's also one of the best things Pixar has ever done. I still give Ratatouille the slight edge in that respect. I'm admittedly biased towards Brad Bird, but considering the difficulty of turning a movie that deals with the intricacies of running a restaurant's kitchen into something entertaining to an audience, let alone a predominately child audience, I have to give his project a slightly higher props. Still, Andrew Stanton and his team have crafted a work worthy of Disney or Miyazaki. I can't pay a higher compliment.
P.S.: Sure we could argue about the irony of a movie with a strong environmental/anti-consumerism message being distributed by a company that has reaped tens of billions off of Happy Meal tie-ins and will undoubtedly reap more from sundry promotional knickknacks related to this film, but that'd be no fun.
