Picking Nits Off 'WALL•E'

It's really hard to find something wrong with a movie that you adore, and the more you adore it, the more you suppress that nagging sense of honest scrutiny just waiting to convince you that your beloved movie is actually the sequel to Pluto Nash. So let me first preface this by saying the following: I LOVED WALL•E and will be the first to jump for joy when it wins best picture this year. There, now that we've got that out of the way you may want to brace yourself and put on some happy music, because all the sugar and rainbows in the world won't sweeten the bitter taste my cold dose of critical medicine will leave.

Here we go...big breathe. The first, and probably most fatal problem with WALL•E also happens to be its driving element: the love story. At a glance it may seem both cute and reasonably fulfilling for the purposes of the G-rated children's audience, but when you really dive into complexities of the relationship, it exhibits an underlying trend in what's wrong with the modern Romantic comedy, mainly a love story between a goofy, weaker man and a superficial, domineering woman.

I'm not trying to make any points about the equality of the sexes, but lately it always seems as if the male figure in a romantic comedy is typecast into a subserviant, comic relief role up against a much stronger, and usually less complex female. WALL•E is the "nerdy" goofball who just happens to win over the affections of the more sophisticated, more aggressive, and often more annoyed EVE. Now it's true personality that WALL•E 's personality of a robot gone a little quirky over time (ala R2D2) works for the story, but that story does little more than present the ridiculous modern romantic concept of the "geek" winning over the "prom queen" because she'll eventually see that your quirks and oddities are actually charming and attractive. Romantic comedies of the 40s & 50s could put both a strong leading man and strong leading woman up against each other (like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in The Philedelphia Story) and end up with a much truer and much more fulfilling romance than any modern attempt at the genre, including WALL•E.

I know it's painful, but stop cursing my children's children and keep reading. It's almost over.

My last major complaint is the lackluster appearance of the human characters in WALL•E. Not only does going to the human world signal an end to the stunning silent storying telling of the first Act, but the characters are neither as memorable nor as funny as the ship's misfit robot crew. In fact, it feels like the addition of the humans into the movie's plot was merely so Pixar could drive home their environmental message. Additionally, the inclusion of a live action human to the mix was both jarring and confusing. I'm not at all sure why those segments weren't animated to maintain consistency with the rest of the film.

I actually heard an interesting argument on Slashfilm that claims WALL•E's grabbing of EVE's hand while she was in here powered down, comatose state was tantamount to date rape, but I'm not willing to go that far. The truth is, there are some flaws in WALL•E (maybe even serious ones), and I personally think I left the theater feeling more enamored after Brad Bird's delightful Ratatouille or last summer. However, despite all that, WALL•E was still one of the best movies of the year, hands down, and if you haven't seen, please for all that is good and wholesome, go see it before it leaves theaters.

Shudder, I feel like I need to take bath now, I feel so, unclean... ;)