Not at all like Johnny Five

As mentioned in my previous post, director Andrew Stanton has been quite open about Wall-E's debt to various eco-themed 70's sci-fi flicks. The most obvious influence is also the most obscure: Doug Trumball's 1972 flick Silent Running. Wall-E would be right at home with the cute little R2D2 archetypes of Silent Running.

The new Pixar flick also brings back the gloom and doom, humanity-is-evil scenarios of films like Planet of the Apes, Logans Run and Aliens. It's a bit cynical to suggest that humanity is doomed to evolve into slug-like creatures, completely dependent on technology. Considering Pixar owes it's success to technology, it seems a tad disingenuous. Sure they put great stories up on the screen - but it's the technology that gave them something no one else had.

My only caveat about Wall-E is the rather jarring use of live-action inserts featuring actual human beings, a first for a Pixar film. It seems cheap and it reads a bit strange when animated humans finally appear in the second half. Imagine if the Wicked Queen in Snow White was a live actor. It takes you out of the cartoon world a bit.

Various clips from Hello Dolly are also featured prominently but the musical bits are tied into the theme more readily than Fred Willard's sudden appearence as a C.E.O./politico proxy. And speaking of live-action stuff, are there any modern films that can tell a story without using faux tv-news clips? Is this a problem anyone else has noticed? Is it cheating?

But I'm just kvetching here. Wall-E is a great film. It makes up for the headache-inducing parts of Cars and it's as cute as Nemo without being cloying.

And no Steve Guttenberg.