Months ago, my friends and I had a night where we had fun making power point presentations on anything we wanted.
I generated positive feedback for my presentation as I managed to dream cast our cohorts into Disney characters. While I did not do a slide for myself, I was asked at the end which character I would best associate with myself. As someone who does not do well socially all the time but is also a hopeless romantic who yearns for romance, I easily identified with the titular character of my favorite Disney/Pixar film to date, WALL-E.
The library of the combined companies has dipped a bit in recent years (I just caught up with Elio, which was rather mid). Those of us who grew up in the first decade of this century can clearly remember how dominate Disney/Pixar was, mainly 2003 (the year of Finding Nemo) to 2010 (Toy Story 3). In between, you had the likes of The Incredibles, Up, and Ratatouille (which is a honorable second place in my list of the best of all the films.)
Then there was the aforementioned WALL-E, which was easily one of the riskiest films the company has done when you consider how silent the film is at first (it is basically a Chaplin film for the first act). Looking back at it, the whole idea of the film would have been at home with one of the short films the company used to do so well with. Thankfully, they made this a full length feature.
That is not to say the pursuit of a robot’s crush is all the film is about. Sure, it talks a lot about environmentalism and how humans are much more lazy than they know. It also has a clear call back to 2001: A Space Odyssey for the antagonist, Auto. In the end though, you have my personal pick of the best cinematic couple of the century to date (it helps when you don’t need to be told entirely when they have their first “kiss” and “dance”.)
At the more recent Good Friday service at my church, I was helping out keep an eye on the kids, and we started to watch WALL-E (no, I don’t know what it had to do with Good Friday, but I was not complaining). There were a fair amount of times the kids were asking us adults why we were laughing.
Thankfully, we did not finish the film in time, or they would have been asking me why I was crying.
(As of this writing, WALL-E is on Disney Plus, as well as in the criterion collection on 4K and Blu Ray).
Nothing else to say 