
Voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Sigourney Weaver
Director: Andrew Stanton
Walla.E has no dialogues for its whole first half 8212; it involves robots8212; and its central character is a robot yellowed and dusty with 700 years of work. However, whether it8217;s clearing up trash left behind by humankind that deserted Earth in a hurry, into neat boxes, or gathering up what it feels are useful stuff and secreting them back to his 8220;home8221; a tank, his friendship with a never-say-die cockroach, or how he listens to a couple sing and dance in 8220;Hello!Dolly8221;, WALL.E steals your heart.
It is inquisitive as a child, sensitive as a human, and when it meets the robot of its dreams, shy as a boy just into his teens. WALL.E fumbles, faints, goes cross-eyed and weak in his knees at the first glance of the snow-white EVE. It8217;s art to convey that through a slight twist and turn of a rusted metal box, and art is what is on display here.
The film does lose a little bit of its momentum when WALL.E and EVE go back to the spaceship Axiom where humans have been hiding out for 700 years. They have spent lifetimes in floating chairs, with everything at their voice8217;s command, getting their entertainment off screen floating along with them. As a result, the humans have lost the capacity to think, feel, decide and even walk the bones have all dissolved to fat.
The humans are the ones who are the machines in space, and it takes a robot they created to clean up their mess, to teach them a lesson in feeling.
It does get a bit complicated and messy when robots in all shapes and sizes keep falling off shelves on the spaceship, but that8217;s not what you take back from the film. It8217;s the strength that8217;s packed in the plaintive cries with which WALL.E and EVE call out to each other, across space. Full marks to Ben Burtt and Elissa Knight the voices of WALL.E and EVE, for never before has an entire love story been told in inflections of just one word.
If Earth as a junkyard isn8217;t such an impossibility, who is to say that we can8217;t have a robot showing us the way?