WALL-E: The Return of Visual Storytelling

Here is my brief summation, as if I had written a full review and this was my closing sentence: WALL-E is a fantastic film, but it is not for everyone.

This became painfully obvious to me as I sat in the theater, personally enthralled by the Pixar magic up on the screen, but unable to escape the huffing, general restlessness, and constant blasts of cell phone light piercing the darkness to my immediate right. That was all my girlfriend's doing. Needless to say, she hated the movie. I'm not sure how everyone else in the theater felt, but thankfully laughter and general amusement seemed to continue up to the final credits. A goth-looking teen couple left about halfway through, never to return, but if anything I considered that an advertisement for the film's high quality.

I must admit, I need to see the film again without the perpetual distraction and discomfort caused by countless shrewd glances and a text message that read: “This is stupid.” Yes, more lovely moments courtesy of my girlfriend. Had WALL-E run thirty minutes longer, I may have ended up a permanent resident of the theater, at least until the cleaning crew came in and discovered my dead body.

So, why did my girlfriend not enjoy WALL-E? Her most telling reaction/explanation came about twenty-five minutes in. I looked over and saw her mouth the phrase, “Does anyone ever talk?!” I suppose I had failed to warn her that the film has very little dialogue, and indeed practically zero dialogue for the first thirty minutes or so. Little did she know that was the very reason I was excited to see it. WALL-E adheres to the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Not always a true statement, I admit. Precious few “pictures” in an Ed Wood movie, for example, are worth any words at all. However, in the hands of the highly imaginative minds employed at Pixar, each image is filled with such intricate detail, one can only pity the writer who attempts to paint the same scene in sentences.

I admire films that fully exploit the unique strengths of this medium to tell their stories. Within the first ten minutes it is clear that, due to pollution in the future, the human race has abandoned Earth aboard a massive spaceship called the Axiom, leaving behind scores of robots to clean up the mess. WALL-E is one such robot. Much like an infant, WALL-E can not express himself through words, but he need not speak to be fully understood. We see that he is lonely, we know how badly he yearns for companionship, we realize the sun gives him life (he's solar powered), we understand that his sole intended function is to compress trash, day in and day out, long after the other models like him have gone quiet and still.

We get to see his personality as well, and machine or not, he certainly has one. After a long day of work, we see him return to the home he has made over the centuries (an old storage shed), where he removes his treads as if they were shoes, watches an old VHS copy of “Hello Dolly!” on a magnified iPod, and remains safe from the frequent storms brewing outside. Illuminated by Christmas lights, we see WALL-E's little collection of knick knacks, the various treasures he has saved in an Igloo Playmate ice chest while he's out doing what he was built to do. One nice gag has him discovering a diamond ring, then tossing it aside in favor of the box it was in, which intrigues him.


When WALL-E watches “Hello Dolly!”, he stares in wide-robot-eyed amazement as the two characters on-screen sing and stroll down the street. WALL-E looks longingly at their hands, the physical connection between them. We see a close-up of WALL-E's own “hands” as he tenderly puts them together, one holding the other, just to imagine what it might be like. Not a word is spoken, but those images are infinitely more poetic and rewarding than someone saying, “I'm lonely, I need to hold someone.” And if the viewer turned away for even a few seconds, the moment would be lost.

Ever since the advent of sound in cinema, this kind of visual storytelling has become something of a lost art. Even now, the very best filmmakers usually find a way to say more in their images than dialogue alone could ever convey. It's like Robert Altman once said, “Images are the reason for film, otherwise you might as well turn off the picture and call it radio.”

Indeed, in the 1940's, families used to gather around the radio, not the television, and listen to radio dramas. People were wizards in that medium as well. Orson Welles, for example, was an expert in the use of sound to tell a story, and later proved an innovator in the use of images too. Honestly though, a person who reads a magazine or cleans the house or lifts weights while “watching” a movie, is doing nothing more than listening to the damn radio. If one finds comfort in missing the entire point of this visual medium, then he or she might as well be living in the 1940's as far as I'm concerned. The images truly are the one and only difference between motion pictures and a radio drama.

I am not implying, however, that WALL-E is a silent film. That would be absurd, untrue, and a grave insult to the immensely talented sound design team. Pixar utilizes everything at its disposal here, image and sound in equal measure, to create a beautifully realized future world and a highly poignant tale. Still, WALL-E is director Andrew Stanton's “love letter” to the films he adores, many of which happen to be from the silent era. Sound effects and music may be accounted for, but dialogue would be superfluous.

In a recent A.V. Club interview, Stanton said:

We definitely felt like, “You know, we should look at the masters because these guys had decades to become the best at telling stories without the dependency of dialogue.” So we watched a Chaplin film and a Keaton film and sometimes a Harold Lloyd film every day at lunch for almost a year and a half, the story crew and the animation crew. And became pretty much familiar with their entire bodies of work. You walk away from that thinking, “What can't you tell completely visually?” These guys were just...everything seemed possible to convey. And you realized how much of that staging and legwork was actually lost when sound came in. People got lazy and just sort of relied on the dialogue to get stuff across.

Key word: lazy. Like Andrew Stanton, I'm a huge fan of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Harold Lloyd. So none of the references to those cinematic legends in WALL-E were lost on me. Overall, however, I would describe WALL-E as 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Jacques Tati, with a spoonful of Chaplin-esque pathos for good measure. Tati's comedy placed an emphasis on the marriage of image and sound (Playtime is so very brilliant), but dialogue was used sparingly. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey can be seen in the science fiction setting and pacing of WALL-E (not to mention the numerous homages, such as the autopilot that resembles HAL 9000), and while 2001 wasn't a silent film per se, it did keep dialogue at a premium.

However, WALL-E is more character driven than a Tati picture or 2001, it is told on a more intimate scale and remains, at its core, a simple love story, which invites the comparison to Chaplin. In fact, there is a scene in WALL-E that unmistakably recalls the famous ending of 1931's City Lights, where the flower girl realizes the true identity of the Little Tramp.


Above, Left to Right: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin
Below, Left to Right: Harold Lloyd, Jacques Tati


Even for those who are not aware of the many references to other films, WALL-E should still be a great experience. So why is it causing some viewers to huff and puff in theaters? Unfortunately, we probably don't need to look beyond our own living rooms these days to find the answer. We live in a world where “Law & Order” reruns, “CSI”, and countless other programs have turned people into passive viewers. Television has essentially become a radio again (mind you, I'm not referring to all television, just the majority of basic network television).

Granted, when you are sitting in a comfy chair watching anything you are, in a sense, passive. But we all know that some films demand more of us than others, forcing at least our brains to engage in more active participation. This doesn't occur with most television programs, where the visuals serve little purpose, redundant dialogue is constantly bashed into our skulls (“Do you get it yet? Are you sure you get it?! One more time to be certain!”), and everything is conveniently wrapped up in a lengthy explanation that may or may not take place in a courtroom.

If you fall asleep during an average episode, only to wake up at the end, chances are you won't miss a beat playing catch up. Nothing is required of the viewer whatsoever, which is why people have fallen into this pattern of “watching” TV as they piddle around the house. “I'm listening,” they say. Then they “watch” a film like 2001 or Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and wonder why they don't know what the hell is going on, or why they ultimately disliked it. Like the scene in WALL-E that I described above: if you look away, you are lost, and there is no dialogue “safety net” waiting to rescue you.

Hey, isn't that what WALL-E had to say about humanity in the future? People fall into a certain pattern of laziness (in our case, lazy viewers), they eventually accept it as the norm, and after enough time passes, the human race entirely forgets about what really matters. Ok, so things aren't quite that dramatic here, but my point remains: too many people have forgotten the importance of images in a film. Images are, or at least should be, the single most crucial ingredient in any motion picture (hence the term “motion picture”).

Pixar knows this, but has never proven it quite so effectively as in WALL-E. As much as I enjoyed the Toy Story movies, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and Pixar's other great works, WALL-E has to be their most accomplished film to date. Is it perfect? No, and that's not what I'm arguing. In fact, to be fair, I don't think it lives up to the very best works of Keaton, Chaplin, or Tati, nor do I think it is quite the masterpiece that 2001: A Space Odyssey is. The environmental message is a bit forced (skyscrapers of trash are more numerous than real buildings?), the second half of the film is not as strong as the first, and so forth.

Still, when all is said and done, WALL-E is one of the greatest animated films of all time, perhaps in my own top five (top ten for sure). I would still place Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, Walt Disney's Pinocchio, and Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies above it, while the finest of all, for me, may forever be Russian animator Yuri Norstein's A Tale of Tales. Nonetheless, WALL-E is a must see film. A special film.

There may be a few voices of dissent, but nothing can take away from Pixar's achievement here. When someone says Citizen Kane is “crap” (those who dislike it usually can't intelligently elaborate beyond that), does that make it any less of a film? No. It will always be held in high esteem by those who hold film itself in high esteem. By that same token, WALL-E will go down in history as one of the finest animated movies ever made. No amount of pissing, moaning, or texting "This is stupid" will ever change that.