Wall-E (2008)

I have seen all Pixar movies except for Cars, and I can tell you right now that Pixar has a formula. All Pixar movies build their plotlines around the same skeleton--whether they are under the sea or in deep space, in a restaurant or in your closet--Pixar has managed to cleverly repackage the same narrative. The hero is usually an unlikely figure who screws up or gets knocked around a bit before being called upon to save the day. He usually comes very close to doing so before he fails completely. He must then pull himself up and really save the day. It's the same basic idea, so that when you go see a Pixar movie, you know that the almost happy ending is not really the ending because Nemo has already escaped from the fishtank or because Syndrome has decided to take his evil elsewhere or because...well, I wouldn't want to spoil Wall-E for you.

Another interesting thing about Pixar movies is the way that they handle adult themes. Sometimes they are downright morbid, as with 1988's "Tin Toy", where a baby's toys face the gruesome prospect of being chewed to death. More often, however, they are just about facing life with honesty. In 2003's short "Boundin'", we learn about accepting ourselves and being accepted by others as a sheep rebounds from the depressing experience of losing his fluff. We do not always get what we want in the 1989 short "Knick Knack", where a snowman cannot escape his snowglobe to play with the Malibu souvenirs. In Ratatouille and A Bug's Life the characters are social outcasts who must prove that they can contribute by their unique abilities. And although not everyone is special in The Incredibles, those who are should accept it with pride.

Tonight I watched all of their shorts (from 1984's "The Adventures of André and Wally B." to 2007's "Lifted"), and I could not help but notice an obsession with tinkering. Many of the shorts have no actual speech, and many of them are about gadgets and the way things work. I was also amazed to see how far the animation really has come. While they still love to tinker on-screen, it's clear that they have done some serious tinkering off-screen as well in the past 24 years. Moreover, the gadgets exhibited in the shorts have personalities and characterizations to marvel at. The iconic Pixar lamp, originally from 1986's "Luxo Jr.", appeared in that short as a mother-baby duo. The baby lamp is doing his own bit of tinkering--discovering that a bouncy-ball will deflate when jumped on. The mother is looking on with the same curiosity and exasperation that a human mother feels. In "Red's Dream" (1987), a little unicycle dreams of his days with the circus in a short that is sad for its idea (his dream is just that--a dream) but fascinating for its ability to make a tragic figure out of a 50% discounted red unicycle. These films have little or no talking in them, but they communicate by the movements of the characters or the little gasps and sighs, as when the alien of 2006's "Lifted" presses every button but the ones needed to beam up a human from his bed.

Wall-E is no different from other Pixar movies. In fact, in some ways it is the integral of all Pixar movies to date. The ultimate movie about robots and tinkering was conceived back in 1994, but it was never realized until now--now that Pixar has tinkered in so many other ways, in both style and substance. The gadget here is Wall-E, a trash-compacting robot of the post-human world. He is the only animate object left on the planet (except for, naturally, a cockroach); all of humanity is cruising around in space as a congregation of almost-entirely synchronized automatons. However, while Wall-E spends his days compacting what we consider to be waste, he recognizes value in certain bits of debris, and he takes them back to the truck he has made into a trash (treasure?) trove. He does his own bits of tinkering, figuring out how to use a VCR and how to change his own eye-bulbs and that a twinkie is appropriate roach food (something which we all knew already). We see the world through the eyes of a creature who is piecing humanity together backwards--trying to understand who we are by what we have built.

The plot of the movie is the usual--a girly-robot, EVE, comes to Earth with the mission of finding life of some sort. Wall-E has found a plant, which EVE stores and takes back to her space cruiser, followed by Wall-E himself and all of the mayhem he can provide. There is a villain and a close-call and the regular Pixar story. But there is also the assignation of personality and purpose to non-living things. As with their iconic lamp, Pixar has once again given life to a trinket, and they have made it full of curiosity and wonder that even many humans lack. Wall-E gets a 9 out of 10 for being innovative and wonderful, for making me see the true magic of a cigarette lighter, and for celebrating tinkering as only a Pixar movie can.