Love Story

Where WALL-E has been out for six months and now appears on every other 10-best list, I couldn't write a traditional review of the film. I found that when I rewatched it two weeks ago, the same things jumped out at me as they did on the August viewing. At the very least, that made my thoughts a little easier to compile.

And yes, I teared up both times at the end.

The cutest couple of 2008 is … a robot duo.

Cinema love stories often begin with a “meet cute.” Lonely, binocular-eyed Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class meets his iPod-smooth love, Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, when she comes to an I Am Legend-like Earth with a directive to seek sustainable life. Our trash-compacting collector – he likes a ring box, tosses the jewelry – is the last thing standing, except a cockroach – and a single plant.

WALL-E, Pixar’s latest offering, has much to say: satire about consumer culture, environmental warning, Easter Egg hunt for film geeks. (Aliens’ Sigourney Weaver is the voice of a computer! It’s a 2001 parody!) After two viewings of this movie, what I remember most is the tenderness between WALL-E and EVE, whose vocal portrayers (Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight) convey so much mostly with chirps and blips.

Director Andrew Stanton uses Hello, Dolly – a worn-out VHS tape serves as WALL-E’s only human companion – to telegraph emotions, but the film reference I think of most is City Lights. WALL-E and EVE have a Chaplin-esque quality to their interactions and a physical connection as sweetly romantic as those found in great Jane Austen adaptations.

WALL-E becomes more ordinary once the action shifts to the spaceship Axiom and Stanton enforces parables about a machine-driven world making humans fat and lazy. Even there, th0ugh, we have moments of beauty: Movie magic occurs with WALL-E, EVE and a fire extinguisher, accented by Thomas Newman’s lovely score. Despite its second-half flaws, love conquers all in WALL-E.