WALL*E by Paul Bullock

Nine movies into their illustrious feature film career, what can we tell you about the latest Pixar product that you won’t already know? That it has cute comedy characters bursting out of virtually every scene? That it boasts stunningly realised animation so real you could reach out an touch it? That it features supreme storytelling that blends humour, pathos and a healthy dose of derring-do to deliver as rich a cinematic experience as you’d get from any live action adult-oriented film? Well, it does, but then that much was obvious. It wouldn't be a Pixar film if it didn't do that. But hows about this? That it delivers sharp satire and surprisingly viable science-fiction which touches on environmental concerns and the nature of humanity. Ah-ha, NOW we have your attention.

Set 700 years into the future, WALL*E is Pixar’s most sophisticated film to date. We begin on a barren Earth long since abandoned by humans. In our stead exist mountains and mountains of rubbish (American right-wingers have already complained of a liberal conspiracy - surprise surprise) and our little Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class (WALL*E to us humans) hero is tasked with picking it up, packing it into teeny cubes and stacking it into several million neat piles. He’s a cute little fella, a cross between Johnny 5 and the robot from A Grand Day Out, but he’s the only one of his kind left and after centuries with only a cockroach and battered copy of Hello Dolly to keep him company he’s getting desperately lonely. All that changes, however, when a sleek female robot called EVE arrives on the scene and little WALL*E falls in love.

For the first forty minutes, this is all there is to the film: WALL*E and EVE pottering about Earth more or less silently. Sure there’s an expressive beep here, an emotive boop there (legendary sound designer Ben Burt on spectacular form), but to all intents and purposes this section of WALL*E is an entirely visual experience - a silent film as good as. It could have been Pixar’s folly, a disaster of epic proportions for the studio built on quick-fire buddy wit and expert vocal performances. But our two leads, their design fundamentally quite simple but doubtlessly the result of months of hard labour at Pixar HQ, express more in a shake of the arm or blink of an eye than they could with a whole volume of dialogue. And with no words cluttering up the soundtrack, director Andrew Stanton is able to build a haunting atmosphere on this alien Earth.

The colour palette consists of little more than dull yellows, rusty browns and burnt oranges, making this formerly lush world look more like the surface of Mars than the planet we know. Thomas Newman’s delicate score fearlessly treads the line between kiddie-quirks and sci-fi geek pleasing eeriness to add to his director’s dystopian nightmare. And the details in Stanton and co-writer Jim Reardon’s script pay enormous dividends. There’s something deeply unsettling (as well as darkly comic) about the idea of humanity living on through nothing more than Rubicks Cubes, nodding dogs and cheesy Michael Crawford musicals. And when you add into that some telling shots (particularly the image of WALL*E’s cockroach friend watching on as the last two sentient vestiges of humanity left on earth blast off for outer space) you have a surprisingly dark film brimming with relevance and spot-on political comment.

The rest of the film takes place on the Axiom, a giant spaceship which is now home to the decedents of those who abandoned Earth hundreds of years prior. Some critics have complained that this is the point at which the film loses its way, with the originality of the opening act making way for a more by-the-numbers space adventure, and it certainly is more kiddie-friendly than what goes before it. But the switch to the mainstream does not come at the cost of the film’s integrity - or its satire. The humans on board the Axiom are all fat and bloated, their bones shrinking in the conditions of outer space and their bodies widening after years of laziness spent in plush moveable chairs which cater to their every whim. When one of them takes this apparatus off, they seem surprised at their surroundings, so comatose by technology they have become. By comparison, the robots, forever beeping with intrigue and excitement, are full of life, more human than those who built them. You get the feeling that somewhere in the ether Arthur C Clarke and Issac Asimov are nodding with approval.

There is one major problem with this, of course. Kids aren‘t exactly down with existentialism and silent film nowadays, and some children may not be as taken with WALL*E as they were with Monsters Inc or Finding Nemo. But such issues are to be expected with what Pixar are doing at the moment. Since Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, they’ve breathed new life into their films, moving away from the buddy comedies which were starting to become a little wearisome after Nemo and moved into something a little more mature, a little more sophisticated. WALL*E is the next stage in that development, and with the likes of adventure story Up and earthquake flick 1906 set to be released in the coming years, it seems like this won’t be the last time we’ll be hailing the latest Pixar flick as another leap forward in their ever-evolving history.