Animation is not my cup of tea.  Neither, under usual circumstances, is what we might as well call "sentimental movies."  Let no one confuse cineastes, however snooty, with the "sensitive."  Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa will stir your feelings, your beliefs, your very soul like nothing else in film, but they don't go for "soft."  Neither, generally speaking, do Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Hawks, Ford, or other deities of classic Hollywood film.

 

     Still, I have to make allowances for films that elicit pure emotion through the combination of visual mastery and storytelling simplicity.  D. W. Griffith's movies are sentimental in the extreme, yet epically moving-- think Broken Blossoms or Orphans of the Storm.  The man knows how to touch, how to thrill a nerve in the most jaded viewer.  So do a handful of the best children's films (the ones for all ages) like Annaud's The Bear or Cuaron's A Little Princess.  Spielberg-- a problematic filmmaker if ever there was one!-- pulled it off with AI.  And Pixar has finally done it for me with Wall-E.

 

     I can't surrender to the temptation to call it an out-and-out masterpiece as Joe Morgenstern does, but I can heartily endorse his follow-up suggestion that it be shopped for a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars.  Rare would be the year that produces two commercial films to rival it in visual ambition and narrative charm.  If Wall-E makes a few concessions to entertaining the kiddies with its second half, they are neither so many nor so ill-advised as to dissipate the film's overall enchantment.  In fact, Spielberg's AI suffered a far more drastic decline in its second act and was shot through with inconsistency (to say nothing of implausibility) in its denouement, yet managed to be frighteningly immediate in its emotional resonance.  Sitting in the theatre, you knew already how haunted you would be.  And so it is with Wall-E, which always manages to introduce a new piece of comic invention or sweet reverie to console us for the loss of the haunted enchantment of its desert Earth.

 

     With all due respect to the many great Catholic thinkers, past and present, who have deeply influenced me, let me admit straight-up:  I absolutely refuse to deny characters like Wall-E or the robot-boy in AI their souls.  I'm not carrying over the metaphysics of the film-story into my waking universe, but neither will I be a Cartesian deadbeat and hold my heart aloof from these beings as though they were mere "machines."  Nor should the optimistic finale of Wall-E distract us from the fact that Wall-E has maintained his spirit far better than any of his human compatriots in their bovine exile.  Returning our planet to its lost organic splendor should be swell, but for the audience, it's the meek little robot who has truly inherited the earth.

 

     Wall-E is simply the great character of American movies in 2008 (Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrific performance, but the character, besides being obviously unlovable, even in a Nicholsonian way, is simply not as remarkable, unless you're one of those Flowers of Hell types who always thinks Evil is more fantastic than Good).  The Chaplin comparisons are apt; like the Tramp, Wall-E tugs at our hearts even as he delights us into laughter.  Smitten with the oddities he finds among humankind's detritus, he is curious and easily smitten, not only by EVE but with so many of the tokens of our own inventiveness, however banal they might seem to us.  From his lonely vantage, Hello, Dolly! functions much the way the Collected Shakespeare did for Huxley's John Savage, but with much more edifying results (perhaps in a cultural vacuum, musicals might give someone a more balanced and benign view of what it means to be human than the abysses of Othello and Lear, however alloyed by the comedies, the majority of which, after all, are rather tart?).  Wall-E tries so gamely to make a little garden of his blighted, lonely world, and it's clear how very much he deserves, as well as desires, to find his EVE.  That his quest to keep her takes him on a spirited odyssey full of heart-tugging reversals comes as no surprise; but thankfully, our suspense is repaid not only with a happy ending, but with so many stardust-sprinkles of lovely magic between these two along the way.