WALL-E

Judged on the theatrical cut as released, about 98 minutes. The first movement is close to fully compelled. Each object WALL-E saves is paid: the lighter gives light to EVE; the tape of Hello, Dolly! teaches him the held hand he will want and later gives the cue that restores him; the boot he hands her carries the plant; the cockroach proves the planet can still keep a life. The billboards of Buy n Large that look like set dressing are the history of the world told in advertising. The subtractive test bites in the second movement: the rogue robots of the repair ward, the long chases through corridors and the garbage airlock run the plant back and forth more than the story needs, and the awakening of John and Mary is a sketch in two beats repeated. The cap is passed with room; the figure holds where the first half’s necessity meets the second half’s sufficiency.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: a civilisation that lets its comforts do its living abandons first its world and then its own body, and care is the opposite of consumption, a matter of attention to particular things. WALL-E, built to compact rubbish, keeps what he finds, sorts a spork by hesitating, and is the only being on either world who looks. The Captain’s “I want to live”, set against survival, names the film’s whole case. The state has become a store: Buy n Large runs the government, and its chief executive is the president. The disclosure in image is full: rubbish towers taller than the city, passengers who never turn from a screen. Held below the bar because the satire is broad and quickly read, the humans are caricature more than condition, and the earth’s recovery is granted by one plant rather than earned.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Elevation is frequent in the first movement and returns at the end. The opening descends from space to a ruined city of rubbish towers under a show tune, and the joke becomes grandeur. EVE’s first flight, looping over the wrecks at speed for the pleasure of it, is release. The dust storm, the night in the trailer and the lighter held up in the dark are quiet summits. The summit proper is the dance in space outside the Axiom: WALL-E driven by a fire extinguisher, EVE circling him, set to Newman’s score, a slapstick device raised to transport. The memory restored by a touch of hands, over the sparks of their joined heads, is the last height. Held below the top because the middle stretch on the ship, its chases and its comedy of hover-chairs, is played level and cartoon-fast, and the climax at the holo-detector is suspense more than elevation.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The myth is built and bears weight. The plot is the flood inverted: humanity rides out a ruined earth in an ark, the Axiom, and a dove, EVE, is sent out to bring back a green leaf as proof that the waters have gone down. Her directive is the dove’s task, and the plot turns on its delivery. Beside it a second pattern runs through the names: EVE, and WALL-E, the creature of earth who compacts earth, a figure of Adam in the root sense; the two return to a garden. The last keeper of a dead world is an old figure, built here into the whole first movement, and the particular stays particular: a spork, a hubcap. Held below the gate because some of the deep is cited rather than built: AUTO’s red eye and the Captain rising to the music of 2001 are quotation, and the Adam and Eve pattern stays in the names more than in the action.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is triple: silent screen comedy, Chaplin and Keaton above all, with Tati’s comedy of machines and modern surfaces; ecological science fiction, with Silent Running (1972), its robots tending the last forest aboard a ship in space, as the near precedent; and Pixar’s own form, the buddy adventure for a family audience. The turn is real. A studio’s flagship feature opens with a long passage nearly without speech, gives its lovers no language, turns its satire on the consumption of the audience it was sold to, sets live-action footage inside animation and models its camera on real lenses. The stake was real. What holds the axis at its figure is the reading’s own pair of charges, both heavy: the silent idiom is a return to film’s oldest grammar rather than an invention, and the second half turns back onto Pixar’s proven path of chase, rescue and reunion, a wager placed on a road already laid.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and the first movement loses what it knows: that love can exist as attention without language. WALL-E and EVE have only names, gestures, eyes and sound, and the film lets them court in that medium, so that what passes between them is shown as the attention itself, not reported. The earth is silent and the Axiom talks without pause, and the contrast is the argument: the humans have voices and screens and do not speak to one another; the robots have neither and do. The camera too carries meaning, with lens flare, shallow focus and pulls of focus borrowed from photography, so a world of machines is seen through the habits of a human eye. Held below the top because from the middle of the ship section the form becomes the inherited grammar of the animated adventure, well used rather than remade, and what the silence knew is restated in dialogue by the Captain.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence over promise, and eighteen years is a short span: the figure is held first by time. The questions have stayed open and grown: whether a film sold with its own merchandise by a large corporation can carry a critique of consumption, or is that critique’s best example; whether its passengers’ bodies are satire of a system or contempt for the body; whether the ending is a credible ecology or a pastoral wish, given that the credits must show the replanting the plot skips. AUTO, a machine obedient to its directive against its captain, has drawn new readings as automated systems have entered ordinary life. The formal return is rich in the economy of the first movement, the sound and the credits’ drift through the history of images. What holds it below the eighties: part of the return is to texture and gag rather than to meaning, and that renews less than a question does.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the film showed that a mainstream animated feature could carry a long passage without dialogue, could make its leads speak through sound design alone, and could take an ecological and economic satire into the widest family market; with a cinematographer’s counsel on lens and light it moved computer animation toward the look of photography. It perfected and extended more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and Pixar’s next feature, Up (2009), whose wordless opening montage of a marriage is often placed in its line. The redirection is real but lies largely within animation, and against the whole cinema of its decade that holds the figure just under eight.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric across eighteen years. The film as released survives whole: one theatrical cut, made and kept as digital data, nothing lost and nothing altered. Presence across those years is of the widest kind for a film of its decade: continuous release on home video, television and streaming, teaching in animation and in sound design, and a figure known well beyond cinema. Box office and fame are presence only, and are not proof. The fabric is computer imaging of 2008, a technology that dates. The film’s choice of worn, tactile, lensed surfaces has aged better than most of its contemporaries, but the human figures are already of their moment, and that keeps the axis below the bar. Eighteen years of the widest presence sets it where it stands; more time is what the axis waits for.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in every department of the first movement. Burtt’s sound is the leads’ voice and inner life: the whir of WALL-E’s eyes, his treads, EVE’s rising tones, meaning carried wholly by pitch. Newman’s score moves between the show tunes and a wide orchestral line, and places the dance in space. The animation of WALL-E’s two eye lenses, which tilt and contract to show doubt, delight and hurt, is acting by mechanism. Layout and light, with Roger Deakins’s counsel, give the rubbish city depth, haze and weather. Stephen Schaffer’s cutting holds the silent passages to a comedy rhythm Keaton would know. The costs: the human figures are designed and animated more generically than the robots; the chases on the ship are staged to studio formula; the live-action Forthright and the animated humans meet uneasily; and the second half speaks its exposition where the first half showed.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: WALL-E alone in his trailer at night, watching a couple join hands on an old tape, and the slapstick chase of escaped repair robots through the Axiom’s corridors. One law governs both: every being follows its directive until something it notices turns it. WALL-E’s directive is to compact, and he collects; EVE’s is the plant, and she turns to him; M-O’s is to clean, and the comedy of his pursuit is that law played fast; AUTO’s directive, A113, is the law refused any turn, and the villain is the machine that cannot notice. The passengers follow their screens until one of them looks up. The range is wide, from silent pastoral to farce and mutiny. The strain lies in the second half’s tempo, which bends to cartoon rules the first half refused, and in passengers who, after centuries without walking, stand and walk at the end because the plot needs them to.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 98 minutes holds. Consciousness, in two machines, shown from outside and fully legible; love, as the whole of the first movement; labour, in WALL-E’s endless work and the robots that keep the ship; the economy and the state as one order, a corporation that is the government; the natural order, in a dead earth, a plant and a cockroach; the human body, in passengers made helpless by comfort; history, in seven centuries told by advertisements and, in the credits, by the history of images. They are integrated: the plant is at once the love token, the political act and the ecological proof. What holds the axis lowest: the family is absent, human consciousness is the Captain’s surface only, the sacred enters only through the pattern of the ark and the garden, and the society of the Axiom is a gag about passengers rather than a people.

Score: 7.2 / 10