Pixar Goes to Space with WALL-E

WALL-E. Image courtesy of Pixar.

By 2008 Pixar had conquered almost all that lay before it. They had made eight animated feature films that were all commercial and critical successes. All of their films pushed the frontiers of what was technologically possible with 3-D computer animation, and many of them also did daring and inventive conceptual stuff, taking audiences on weird journeys through wildly imaginative animated worlds. But there was one place they had not gone yet: the lightless, suffocating void of space.

This was the new ground WALL-E sought to explore in 2008. And, like Julius Caeser, it came, it saw and it conquered. WALL-E is one of my favorite Pixar films. It’s the first film that is honest about being set on a post-apocalyptic Earth and it doesn’t shy away from blasting humanity for its complicity in its own demise. I mean, it still sends this message in a very kid-friendly Disney way (by animating future humans as absent-minded rotumbulous totems to excess and decay it manages to make them into accidental villains, who do bad because of their carelessness rather than their malice). It also pulls off the neat trick of turning a cockroach into an endearingly whimsical side character.

But it ALSO does the even neater trick of making the audience root for two mostly speechless robots to fall in love. The opening of WALL-E, like the opening of another contemporary masterpiece There Will Be Blood, is wordless - it has the confidence to simply submerge the audience in the visual power of its world, and let that wash over us. We don’t need exposition, we don’t need set-up. We just see this world unfold before our eyes and we are hooked.

And like all Pixar worlds, it’s a beautiful one. Jim Reardon, a long-time director on The Simpsons, co-wrote the screenplay, and Reardon certainly understands the visual language of animation. Along with director and co-writer Andrew Stanton, one of Pixar’s original Brain Trust members, they must have written the movie with a deep understanding of how the entire apparatus of this film - the setting, the story, the characters - would work in service of a purely visual cinematic experience. And of course, when you have Outer Space as your canvas, there is a lot of stuff you can pull off visually.

The environmentalist message is nice, but the real star of this film is the ways in which it leverages animation to explore both a desolate, trash-filled Earth as well as the empty wonderland of space. The other real star of WALL-E are, of course, the robots. The ways in which the film imbues these robots with personality is really an amazing accomplishment. And so, WALL-E broke the space barrier for Pixar. It wasn’t a huge earner, pulling in $100 million less than Ratatouille, but I think it’s pretty easily one of the best films they ever made and at this point - the mid 2000s - Pixar was basically firing on all cylinders and making consistently great and consistently groundbreaking films.

But soon, that record would start to be put to the test.