|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hollywood Hues Desire, anxiety and pain are beautifully etched in a computer-generated vision of earth in
Wall-e, says Ervell E. Menezes
An ecological parable set in the post-apocalypse future,
Wall-e is essentially a beautifully rendered computer-generated vision of the earth then, a desolate, browned-out wasteland teeming with rundown skyscrapers and totally devoid of any signs of human life and resembling the moon’s surface. The only moving creatures are an industrious waste-crushing robot and his sidekick — a cockroach.
Wall-e or Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth class for short (Ben Burtt’s voice) spends his days gathering and compacting garbage. He does this all day long, mechanically, tirelessly. But waiting out there in the desolate wilderness is Cupid or Eve (Elissa Knight), a cute and snazzy elongated egg-shaped Research Probe. The first meeting is sweetly put across. Chirps and beeps follow this love-at-first-sight experience and their communication rises from the banal to even touch the sublime as they together try and find out whatever has happened to human life on earth? Director Andrew Stanton, whose body of work includes
Toy Story, Finding Nemo and among other animation hits... Stanton’s narrative alludes to a number of sci-fi classics and also has video sequences of
Hello Dolly playing quite overtly. A zippo lighter, Rubic’s Cube and different forms of hardware are among
Wall-e’s collection of mementos stored in a rundown cupboard in which his friendly cockroach takes shelter from the many dust storms that are a regular occurrence. With
Wall-e, Pixar has surely broken new ground. The characters are visually superb with humanistic features and their voices are rendered smoothly. Desire, anxiety and pain are beautifully etched. So is the general mood of the
narrative but midway through it runs into dry weather and the mechanical mumbo jumbo tends to get boring. The unduly long middle is its only minus point. But it later picks when we come to the climax and all’s well that ends well. The screenplay by Stanton and Jim Reardon, based on a story by Stanton and Pete Doctor works rather well and the story moves along interestingly for most of the time with Jeremy Lasky’s camerawork embellishing the visuals. Thomas Newman’s music also enhances the narrative to make Wall-e and outstanding animation classic.
|
|||
|
|
|||
