House of Pixar pushes boundaries and succeeds in 'WALL-E'

WALL-E *** – Rated G; animated with the voices of Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, Kathy Najimy, John Ratzenberger; directed by Andrew Stanton; opening Friday at ShowPlace 8 in Carbondale, Illinois Centre 8 in Marion and the Grand Theatre in Du Quoin.

The most ambitious film yet from the House of Pixar, "WALL-E" is an intergalactic epic about robot romance, furious physical comedy and the fate of humanity.

If that's a lot of ground to cover, if the film's reach exceeds its grasp ... well, this critic is in a forgiving mood. You can't advance an art form without taking risks and making a few missteps. "WALL-E" bravely charges into thematic territory and a presentational style that few movies - much less animated ones - have dared to explore.

In the wordless but exhilarating first half-hour of Andrew Stanton's film we find ourselves on a barren dusty planet littered with the remains of civilization. People once lived here, but they're long gone, leaving behind a ravaged landscape of skeletal buildings and mountains of trash.

We get this information not through narration or "Star Wars"-ish creeping credits but simply by watching and observing. This is the first hint that "WALL-E" won't be business as usual.

WALL-E (short for "waste allocation load lifter Earth-class") is a boxy little robot with big binocular eyes on a long E.T. neck. Every day he gets up, recharges his batteries in the sunshine and gets to work picking up armfuls of junk. He places the refuse in his trash-compactor body, reducing it to large cubes which he stacks to form soaring pyramids.

There are lots of these pyramids, suggesting that WALL-E has been hard at work for centuries. From the carcasses of worn-out robots we surmise that he once had help, but now he's alone.

Well, not quite. He does have a pet cockroach, a sign that inside his rusty frame there lurks something like a soul. And WALL-E is obsessed with an old video of "Hello, Dolly!" that he watches at night in the trash bin he calls home. He's particularly fascinated with a scene in which a boy and girl sit on a bench and shyly hold hands. The guy's a romantic.

So when one day a strange spacecraft lands nearby and deposits a sleek white robot that floats effortlessly in mid air, Wall-E is smitten. (You can tell by his mechanical burblings, whistles and sighs.)

This graceful visitor is Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), sent by what's left of mankind to check out conditions on Earth. At first she regards WALL-E as a threat and very nearly blows him away with her intimidating arsenal. Gradually she learns to tolerate her annoying suitor. And when he produces what she's been looking for - a lone spindly seedling that somehow has sprouted up among the refuse - her mission is complete and she heads for home with WALL-E a stowaway on her rocket.

What's amazing about all this is how invested we become in characters lacking faces or human voices. Stanton and his animators suggest personality only through body language, gesture and movement. The makers of this film seem to have tremendous faith in the intelligence of their audience.

It's in "WALL-E's" second act that things get iffy.

WALL-E and Eve rendezvous with the Axiom, a massive ship that is home to what's left of mankind. After 700 years of being waited on hand and foot by robots, humans have devolved into bulbous, pear-shaped couch potatoes who drift about on motorized recliners. Their unused limbs have atrophied, their minds have been numbed with nonstop entertainment, their children are bred in test tubes.

Which apparently is fine with Auto, the computer autopilot that runs the Axiom. Auto is shaped like a ship's wheel and has the same single red glowing eye so familiar from HAL 9000 in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." (At one point the soundtrack even blares out "Also Sprach Zarathustra.")

Ostensibly Auto serves his human makers, but like many rulers he wants to preserve the status quo. WALL-E and Eve's news that Earth is once again habitable threatens his reign. It's up to the usually ineffectual ship's captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin) to defy this mechanical mutineer and steer the Axiom back to her home planet.

While the film's opening passage is quiet and measured, the Axiom sequence is busy and a bit silly. A small army of robots must be battled, tricked or coerced by WALL-E and Eve, and the high jinksare so dense and frantic that it's hard to keep track of who's who.

Worse, the film fritters away its gentle, even heartbreaking mood by attempting to placate the kids in the audience. In its second half "WALL-E" becomes confusing and cluttered and fails to deliver the emotional payoff we've been waiting for.

Moreover, the film is rarely funny in a conventional sense. Odd and quirky? Certainly. Laugh-out-loud? Hardly ever.

Whatever its shortcomings as narrative, "WALL-E" is a brilliant visual accomplishment, a sci-fi saga in a palpably believable environment (at least until the cartoonish humans show up).

An uneven blend of brooding art film and kiddie comedy, "WALL-E" falls short of greatness. Even so, it pushes the animation envelope with every frame.