To help pre-celebrate tomorrow’s Canada day, we went along to see Wall-E, the latest masterpiece from Pixar. I don’t know how Pixar always make me think their movies will be a bit crap from the trailers, but they do. Thankfully the movie is wonderful. The story follows a garbage collecting robot as he scurries around a trash covered planet Earth sometime in the future. An inquisitive chap, Wall-E collects trinkets, repairs himself with parts from his fallen colleagues and has a pet cockroach. Yes, that’s right. Pixar are so damn good these days they can make you emotionally connect not only with robots, but cockroaches. In fact for the first half of the film you hardly see a human at all and there is very little spoken – the epic scenes of abandoned cities full of garbage, with a futuristic sound track just fill you with wonder and sadness at the same time.
Wall-E is an ecological love story between two robots – one the red-headed step child of Number Five from Short Circuit, the other the evolved pinnacle of iPod style design. The film tells us the ultimate end point of our consumerist obsessions, but never preaches and offers a hopeful ending as the credits roll. It’s a heart achingly beautiful movie, yet fun to watch. What more could you want?