Review: Wall-E

And welcome back to The Chronicles of Trevor, the ONLY blog that has all you need and so much more.

Since Valentine's Day is 'round the corner, I've decided to change the Pixar movie review this week to a movie of theirs with a romantic element, and what better than 2008's WALL-E!

This movie, set hundreds of years in the future, stars a lonely robot named WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class), living on the desolate, over-polluted Earth, which was controlled by a mega-corporation known as Buy N Large (BNL). WALL-E is a trash-compacting robot, all alone with no one to hang out with, when suddenly, a sleek, plant-searching robot named EVE (an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator probe), looks for signs of life on Earth, so that people aboard the ship Axiom can return home. 

I have to say that the animation is amazing! The music by Thomas Newman is amazing, and the use of music from Hello, Dolly! (1969) is cute, but kinda hilarious in hindsight, considering that film was released by 20th Century Fox, which we all know, was bought by Disney (who acquired Pixar 2 years before this film), and defaced in 2020 of all years with a terrible name change (20th Century Studios). I like the use of Mac text-to-speech voices for AUTO and M-O's interface, and the vocal effects (autotune and ring modulation) added to the robot voices. EVE kinda sounds like a female Dalek, just without the British accent. 

I also enjoyed Sigourney Weaver's computer voice. I think that that type of voice would be good for a dystopian Mega-Corp's announcement system.

Also, I like the fact that there's a BNL logo at the end of the film, after the Disney castle and a fun Pixar logo variant, where Luxo's bulb blows out, and WALL-E bumps into the R in the logo after giving Luxo a "curly bulb" (a CFL, or compact fluorescent lightbulb). WALL-E improvises, and uses his arms and front trapdoor to make an R.

I also really enjoy the running gag of M-O getting annoyed at WALL-E kicking around "foreign contaminants" like there's no tomorrow.

And let's not forget that timeless scene of WALL-E and EVE flying through space with that fire extinguisher, besides Buzz and Woody "falling with style" in the climax of Toy Story (1995), this has to be one of my favorite Pixar scenes EVER.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!