“These are called farms. Humans would put seeds in the ground, pour water on them, and they grow food - like, pizza!”

I hadn’t seen WALL·E in probably at least a decade, so I thought that now would be a good time to revisit it, mainly because I’ve been watching a lot of Pixar movies as of late (which I need to get back on) and because I know it makes a lot of nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I just recently watched and absolutely loved. I have been watching all of the Pixar movies in order of release, but kind of made a time jump this time (the last one I watched was The Incredibles), so seeing the complete spike up in animation quality was pretty surprising. WALL·E is a fantastically animated movie, and one of the studio’s most ambitious in my opinion.

Now, onto the actual review. This is a spoiler-free review, of course, as always, but I do want to start off my positives with, well, the start of the movie. The entire first act is roughly thirty to thirty-five minutes long, and throughout the length, especially at the beginning, there isn’t really any talking at all. There are a few parts where it replays a message from the past, telling us just a little bit about what happened to Earth, and why it is the way it is, but for the most part, you can understand what has happened simply through its visuals. The dry planet and all of the trash convey that the Earth has decayed simply through human negligence. While this might not be one of my favorite movies from the studio, this section is undoubtedly some of the best stuff they’ve ever made.

Obviously, though, the standout of the movie is its title character, WALL·E. WALL·E is proof that you don’t need a character, or even a main character, to talk really at all to be deep and compelling. He’s honestly one of my favorite Pixar characters, and a lot of that has to do with how subtly he’s written. While he doesn’t communicate his feelings through words, you can literally always tell what he is thinking and feeling through the way he acts.

Once EVE comes into the picture, this becomes even more the case. While I do find EVE’s voice kind of annoying to be honest (which isn’t a criticism really worth delving deep into), she is also a very compelling character that only improves WALL·E’s characterization. She isn’t really very complex on her own, that is, without WALL·E, but that doesn’t really matter because there are plenty of poignant moments between the two of them. I also really like their relationship as a whole, kind of being a romance, but also kind of not at the same time in any way that gets weird.

Behind all of Pixar’s films, there is, of course, a message, and WALL·E definitely has a pretty good one. It’s not really about climate change in the sense of how we look at the issue today (though some may argue against that), but rather more of a message of the consequences of human negligence. I won’t go much deeper than that because I already talked a little bit about it at the very beginning of this review, but the last thing I will say here is that it’s yet another aspect of this movie, adding onto the animation, that’s a lot more of a bold swing than other Pixar works.

After the first act, WALL·E and EVE find themselves aboard the ship that humans have been living on for years, and this is honestly where I find the film kind of declines a little bit for me. It eventually gets back to being really interesting and compelling again by the third act, but the whole middle act, I think, is a little heavy-handed. I really like the message, as I already conveyed just in the last paragraph, but I think the film goes a little too far into showing us what has happened to the humans over the years. Yes, we get to see the ship design and all of that is really cool, but when it comes to the actual people on it, I don’t need to see their incredibly lazy lifestyles to know what this film is trying to say because I already got it from the first act.

Even aside from that, I think the pacing as a whole is the worst here, too. WALL·E and EVE don’t spend nearly as much time together, and we get a lot more out of the ship’s captain instead, who really isn’t very interesting. The whole middle act as a whole is the one thing that I would say keeps this from being a great film overall.

I know my last portion of the review might sound like I don’t really like WALL·E all that much, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite my criticisms, I still really enjoy it and find it to be a really fascinating watch.