Gosh Pixar are ambitious. I tend to find little to praise in animated features – I get stuck in the moralizing and generally find the aesthetic wave of computer-gen particularly uncompelling. Yet of the bunch, Pixar seem to get better and better, *almost* swaying my opinion with their consistent films and vocal fans.
I giggled my way through the animated short Presto that began the film - a great piece of animated slapstick based on a very simple magical trick, kinetically propelled towards insanity by the kawaii-eyed offspring of Bugs Bunny and an appropriately gentlemanly magician.
Wall*e is love story between two monosyllabic robots with a tonne of unexpected personality. The story of the environment in peril and much like in Happy Feet, it seems that only an insanely cute anthropomorphized digi-character to create a renewal of capital-H Humanity.
In story, the film relies heavily on gesture to articulate its narrative, an approach that means the film cannot be easily distilled into a series of comic catch-crys or ubiquitous caped costumes, which the child audience usually consumes and circulates with frenetic enthusiasm. I wondered if the film was at all accessible to the ‘child’ demographic, but decided this was largely irrelevant in the whole endeavor, because for all intents and purposes Wall*e was a really solid film with all signs of longevity.
