WALL-E Review

The opening act is the boldest thing a major animation studio has released: forty minutes of near-silent character work carried by servo whirs, a worn musical on videotape and a boxy robot with binocular eyes. Roger Deakins consulted on the lighting and it shows, because the studio abandoned the clean animated look for simulated anamorphic lenses, lens flares, racked focus and even dirt on the virtual glass. The Earth sequences have genuine photographic weight.

Ben Burtt's sound design functions as the screenplay for that stretch, building a full emotional vocabulary out of two synthesized names. Then the Axiom arrives and the film turns conventional: a broad satire of consumer sedation, a captain-versus-autopilot plot, and human characters rendered as an easy joke the film never quite recovers from. Thomas Newman's score and the fire-extinguisher space ballet keep the second half aloft. A radical opening with a safe landing, which is exactly why it sits just below the studio's very best work.