Pixar gets mad points for difficulty in their latest film endeavor, WALL-E. After watching the trailer the first time, I was intrigued how the technical animation would truly make or break this movie. With main characters that can’t speak (not much anyway) and have very limited facial expressions, the pressure was on to create lovable, emotional beings out of tiny scraps of metal sans dialogue. The end result was a beautiful experiment in visual storytelling, made more special by the originality of concept and a timely sociopolitical message.
Lips, eyes and eyebrows become luxuries of on-screen character development when your subjects are little more than spheres and cubes with wheels. The character design was amazing, with robots of all shapes, sizes, makes, models and personalities truly overshadowing the human characters who dully share an identical pear-shaped physique, and emotionally resemble… well… robots. in the end, the animators succeed admirably in creating living, breathing, emoting creatures out of those cold spheres and cubes.
The first part of the film is by far my favorite, with our gritty worker-bot hero Wall-E going about his everyday routine and unraveling a past of corporate consumerism gone awry. He soon encounters a sleek, sexy instrument of Apple brand death and destruction named E.V.E. and the duo form a complex relationship using nothing but flawlessly timed animation.
The film is a perfect abstraction of visual storytelling, utilizing only the most essential elements of motion, color, sound and symbols to do the whole job. Granted, there is a lot more dialogue in the film than I’ve indicated here, but those scenes are saved for the human characters who are ultimately a sideshow to the robots. So when you go see Wall-E (and you should), take notice of how much can be conveyed by moving shapes with the vocabulary limitations of a Pokemon. And ask yourself, how did they make me love a stupid cube with wheels so fucking much?
RIP Joe Ranft
