“I’ve seen WALL*E and it’s the best movie I’ve seen this year,” says HE’s Austin -based correspondent Moises Chiullan. “I went into it only having seen a brief preview at last year’s Butt-Numb-a-Thon and the trailers. Do yourself the same favor and go in cold and un-influenced. I didn’t think I’d like a Pixar film more than Ratatouille, but I think WALL*E really redefines how you think about Pixar, trite as that may sound.
“Yes, the movie is fine for kids, but honestly, it’s better for adults — not more appropriate, just more of a definitive cinematic experience. The movie is a great deal closer to Modern Times than An Inconvenient Truth, even though the news media is going to sensationally mislead everyone like they have throughout the election cycle so far…in the interest of selling adverts or airtime.
“I want to take great care to not spoil one ounce of WALL*E more than others already have, and even pull back from railing against some of the accusations I’ve seen written about by both those who’ve seen it and the idiots still calling WALL*E a character design rip-off from Short Circuit (way wrong).
“The bleak, desolate planet Earth has become in the story is shown in all the trailers. The rampant consumerist devouring of resources is at fault. But the real bent of the movie is housed in the ‘little tramp’ love story at its core, even though, yes, of course, the ‘let’s not destroy the earth’ thing is in there, but there is more emphasis on hope in the human spirit.
Similar to the Chaplin-vs.-Keaton argument, the dialogue regarding “what WALL*E is ‘really’ about” may continue until all known traces of the movie are gone. From a certain perspective, you could say that Stanton and others are glossing over the ‘green’ message, but that assessment is off-base. The movie is more fundamentally about what it is to exist and believe in hope. Every science fiction film with a desolate Earth as a backdrop does not make that its main focus, and neither does WALL*E.
“I’ve let WALL*E roll around in my head for around a week and a half since seeing it, and I can’t shake it (a good thing). It would be one thing if I were exploding with praise the day after seeing it, but the factthat it’s still as captivating almost two weeks later, to me, means the movie has to be the real deal. This movie falls under the Important Cinema banner regardless of what piece of its narrative you fall in love with. This really could be one of the movies people will still argue about in 25, 50, or 100 years.”