Wall-E

I recently watched Pixar's Wall-E for the second time. I was reminded by how good the movie was, particularly from a graphics perspective. This movie definitely used a different approach to a story and presentation than preceding Pixar movies. Previously, there was more of an emphasis on the humanness of the characters, even when they were non-human things like toys, fish, monsters, cars, etc. In Wall-E, there was more emphasis on realism of the main characters and the environment they were in, even if a bit exaggerated. The robots, Wall-E and EVE looked like they could actually be real robots, and they didn't use a warping of their figure to show human expressions  like we saw with, say, the cars in  Cars. Even so, the robots did convey emotions -- in a robot sort of way.

The film received an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, as well as it should have. I think of Wall-E as the closest thing to an independent-like-artsy film that Pixar has done. It defied convention, especially when you consider that for nearly half of the movie, there was no conventional dialog. Because of this, it seems that it was less received by young audiences than previous films, at least based on my own anecdotal experience. However, my son, Ethan, took a liking to the movie and has watched it far more than I have.

I first saw Wall-E last summer when our staff here at R-Technics took an afternoon off and went to see it in the theatre. Since we're fond of impressive 3D graphics work, we feel an obligation to watch these movies and closely analyze them. We have an even keener interest in Pixar films now that one of our former interns, Reid, works at Pixar.

Tomorrow, the next Pixar movie, Up is debuting. Looks like the R-Technics staff will be taking another afternoon off soon -- for research purposes, of course!

(BE197)

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