It’s A WALL•E World
I just saw WALL•E the other night. It was a wonderful film with some superb animation (particularly haunting during the early Earth sequences), simple story and powerful message. I have to commend above all the very skillful voice work in this robot love story - WALL•E and EVE say almost nothing but their names to each other, but artists Ben Burtt and Elissa Knight put so many varied expressions of emotions into these words that the characters and their feelings hit you deep down.
The film has become more meaningful as I have reflected on it more, especially after I read this this passage from an interview with director Andrew Stanton:
WORLD: How does WALL•E represent your singular vision?
STANTON: Well, what really interested me was the idea of the most human thing in the universe being a machine because it has more interest in finding out what the point of living is than actual people. The greatest commandment Christ gives us is to love, but that’s not always our priority. So I came up with this premise that could demonstrate what I was trying to say—that irrational love defeats the world’s programming. You’ve got these two robots that are trying to go above their basest directives, literally their programming, to experience love.
With the human characters I wanted to show that our programming is the routines and habits that distract us to the point that we’re not really making connections to the people next to us. We’re not engaging in relationships, which are the point of living—relationship with God and relationship with other people.
Act Oners and other Christians often wonder where the great Christian film artists are - they’re alive and well and living at Pixar
You can read the rest of this wonderful interview here.
And enjoy the trailer:
I just can’t help adding:
Waaaallllll-eeee!!!
Eeeev-aaaaaa!!!!