We All Need A Little Wall-E

Taken from http://www.obsessedwithfilm.com/ where you can find a lot more of my postings. Please folks, go have a looksie...


There’s a lot of films that have been hyped up this year. The Dark Knight for one. Indy was another. Yet all year long I’ve seen cardboard cut outs in my cinema foyer of some sort of little robot chappy called Wall*E.
And I was intrigued.

Now I freely admit that I am a sucker for the cute side of film making. Some will argue that this makes me a bad person, someone who’s views can’t be taken seriously. And they must be right because after all, if I succumb to the experience, what am I truly taking from the picture?

This is my point with this article really, the completely shallow way which some people view movies, and I’m going to prove it using Wall*E. So I’ll start by telling you why I love Wall*E, and you should too.Let’s not get bogged down in whether or not the film was cheesy to start, because it was. It has to be, because first and foremost it’s a kids film. Let’s look at Wall*E himself.

Here we have a character for whom actions speak louder than words. I’ve read articles comparing Wall*E to Chaplin’s Tramp character, and you have to say, that the comparisons are fair. Here we have a character who doesn’t have to rely on speech to create a truly sympathetic comic character. A creation that we instantly feel for. He is personified in such a way that after a while, he’s not a robot, he’s the good in all of us. If there really were a devil and an angel who appeared on your shoulder, it wouldn’t surprise me if the angel appeared looking like Wall*E. The guy is just that nice.

And it’s not a sickly nice either. Pixar created someone – not something either – that genuinely has a warmth. Someone that makes the simple things, like extending a hand to help someone up, telling them your name, or simply just waving at them, seem easy to do. It’s a sad indictment on us a race that these little gestures seem so grand in this movie, that they stand out from the norm and separate Wall*E from everything else that’s going on.

His steadfast dedication, especially throughout his vigil for Eve is again a concept that stands out and makes him a hero, because it’s simply something that you rarely see these days. If someone had tried to blow you too pieces with a ray gun, and then completely blanked you, would you stand watch if they slipped into an unshakeable sleep?

It’s these earlier things that make Wall*E work though. True the setpiece arrives where he puts his life on the line, but we’re used to these huge heroic gestures in film, we’re not used to the little stuff, and that’s why his character works.

There are however cynics out there. A breed of people so warped, so introverted and so up their own shiny metal asses, that they have lost sight of what Wall*E is about, and to me it’s worrying.
Surfing on a rather popular movie site, let’s call it Web Film File Collection, I perused the message boards of the Wall*E page looking to see what comment had been passed. I don’t post their that often because to be fair it’s overrun by self righteous moron’s, and my point was proven when I came across a post from someone who shall remain nameless lest they use OWF. They had argued that Wall*E was a let down (they might even have said lame, which is like, so, y’know, lame.) because the ending wasn’t (and I really to this day can’t believe this was said) “dark enough.”

What on earth were they expecting? Just because at the end of Life is Beautiful it’s alright to kill Guido, doesn’t make it alright to kill Wall*E. There’s a reason the two films have vastly differing age certificates, and yet wholly similar messages, and that’s because one’s a kids film. It’s not rocket science to work out.

Imagine the egg on the face of Pixar if hundreds of kids stream from the cinema’s bawling their eyes out because Wall*E didn’t reboot? Or if they’d have let Sid have his wicked way and blast Buzz into space before decapitating Woody? What if Princess Fiona had told Shrek that his resemblance to Wayne Rooney was to much to deal with, and she wanted to go back to being a human? It just wouldn’t have worked.

The sad thing is however, there are people who don’t believe in happy endings anymore. People can’t accept the “Hollywood” ending where it all comes out alright, because it’s “cheesy.” Some people are now so bitter and twisted about what’s going on in their own lives, they don’t believe things can get any better, and therefore films shouldn’t show a supposedly false reality. The thing is however, that if these people believed in a happy ending, they might find it for themselves. If the poster on that other forum hadn’t been so concerned with “offing” Wall-e then he might have looked deeper at the message Wall*E is trying to get across.

It doesn’t matter how bad things are. It doesn’t matter if you feel you’ve got a world of crap to clean up and no-one to help you. If you’re nice to people, nice things will happen back. Sure you’ll endure drama’s along the way, but you shouldn’t give up. Call me a sentimental fool, or an old romantic, or anything less tasteful – I don’t care, I just think that if we all tried to be a bit more Wall*E, things might start getting better.