Wall-E [Blu-ray]

In case you didn't have the good fortune of catching this movie when it was in theaters, it's the story of the last robot left on Earth after the humans fled the planet on a resort spaceship while the planet was being cleaned up by robots like Wall-E that compact trash and incinerate it since we we produced way too much trash for the planet to handle. I don't want to talk too much to the story, particularly because of spoilers (I hate spoiling things, even months after a movie is out), but it's really quite impressive. After watching it again I'm convinced that it's my favorite animated movie of all time. Part of what I love about it is that it doesn't have to compromise by having something for the kids and something for adults to enjoy like a lot of animated movies tend to do, it's just a wonderful experience for everyone. It really is unique, in my opinion, in this way. Even the physical humor really isn't childishly silly, it's clever. I kind of feel like it's a modern-day geek movie on par with Tron or Real Genius. Could it be the first one since The Matrix? I think it's the best robot movie ever. Suffice to say, the always stellar folks at Pixar really outdid themselves with this movie. It's fun, beautiful, heart-warming, fascinating, nerdy, and probably much more that I'm forgetting to say here. It's just really one of those rare A+ movies, which is confirmed when 5 months later I'm chomping at the bit to see it again and feel every bit as good about it as I did when I originally saw it.Now let's get into the Blu-ray set here. The visuals are every bit as stunning on Blu-ray as they were in the movie theater. The problem with DVDs was that the quality was always inconsistent between movies. My Stranger Than Fiction disc looks almost like 1080i, but not my Batman Begins. Not so with Blu-ray, as far as I can tell. The bigger the screen you have at your disposal the more impressed you're likely to be. I was trying to finish up my laundry as I started the movie but I could not pull my eyes away from the movie because of how jaw-dropping the visuals were. And as if that wasn't enough, the audio is equally impressive. My TV only has simulated surround sound, but it felt pretty real to me. It's funny how a movie with so little dialogue can have such powerful audio through its score and robot noises and such. I can't even imagine how incredible this set will be for those with a true Dolby setup at home.I should really step back for a second and remark at how impressed I am by the all around presentation from Disney. They really know how to brand themselves and their intellectual property. The first thing I encountered was BD Live stuff, and so I gladly went to the Disney site to setup my account and had no troubles at all. I'm 99% sure you could go right past all of this, but I just chose not to because I was excited about BD Live. There was only 4 features available, 2 of which I couldn't use. One was movie chat, where you and other friends with the movie can watch the move at the same time while text chatting. Yes, it will synchronize your movies, so I guess this would be good for cousins in different cities or when dad is on a business trip or something. They made the smart move of only allowing this between trusted friends, not just random strangers. Another one is movie mail, in which you can splice together scenes from the movie to make messages to send to trusted friends, and also add in video of yourself (no idea how, maybe through an EyeToy for PS3 owners?). I did use the movie challenge feature though, where you can join in live trivia challenges with strangers online in 10 minute rounds of 8-15 questions. I could choose from easy or medium, and I chose easy. They were fairly simple questions and what I loved was how it would just be at the bottom of the screen while you watch the movie. So you can pause the movie, open this up, and play while resuming playback. It's actually pretty fun and you get points depending on how fast you answer. The last feature is reward points, which is confusing to me but I think you earn them through the trivia and other stuff on the Disney site and you can redeem them for avatars and other bonus features and stuff, but I think that this is still in the process of being fleshed out more.I liked the BD Live features because I felt like they were easy to get to and integrated well, but the other stuff was even better. First of all, there are 3 ways to watch the movie, or two in addition to just watching the normal movie. One is called Cin-experience, where you get insightful director's commentary in addition to picture-in-picture pop-ups of artwork and (silent) videos of animation from the pre-visualization and design stages of the film. I usually never listen to these commentary tracks, but in a movie with as little dialogue as Wall-E, I gave it a shot and loved it. The artwork really does add a surprising amount to the experience, and I learned a lot of cool random things about the movie, like that it took them over 3 years to put it together (it sounds like they started thinking about it in the late 90s). You could also turn off the artwork from the pop-up menu, which is a standard thing with Blu-ray discs. If you watch the movie normally, you can pop-up stuff from the main menu without having to pause the movie, like choosing a scene via screen shot rather than having to do the guesswork of skipping ahead or backwards on your remote. The other way to watch the movie is kind of like Science Mystery Theater where a group of four people who helped with the film and are generally kind of geeky point out random trivia and scientific inconsistencies and such, with a silhouetted couch occasionally popping up. It really was them on the couch, or else they put an undue amount of effort into animating their arms and hands as they talked. It was a really fun spin on a commentary track and I enjoyed the little of it that I tried out (I will watch the whole movie with it eventually). The only gripe I had with these was that you couldn't just turn them off in the middle of the movie. You could fairly easily stop the movie and go back to the main movie to choose the chapter and then resume playing in normal mode, but it should've been an easy on/off switch. Despite that odd pitfall, it really does help show why Blu-ray really is better than DVD.There's more extras than that, and what's more exciting is that they're pretty much all in high-definition, even the promotional "sneak peeks"! While I appreciate the throwback to the video cassette Disney movies where they start out with "Coming soon to video" and all that (they had the same style and everything), I still don't think I like them starting out when you put in the disc the second time. I forgive it because there were a couple of really cool ones that looked gorgeous in HD, including one for the Disney documentary Earth. That's probably going to be in every big box electronics store as a demo once it's out on Blu-ray a year from now. It was simply the most incredible thing I've seen on my TV, including Wall-E. Anyway, there are real extras here, so let me stop teasing you with these psuedo-extras. The Axiom Arcade has 4 8-bit games that look like they would've been on your NES, and I thought that they were nifty, though maybe too advanced for kids not on the tail end of elementary school. There was also an interactive storybook for kids and "Trinkets and Treasures", which seems like it was animators playing with Wall-E and Eve to do random things, like Wall-E breaking a vacuum (which was one of the early teasers for the film). For the adults there's a documentary that's over an hour long, 3-D fly throughs of the virtual sets, Buy and Large shorts, a short Geek-o-rama featurette, profiles of all the robots in the film, and deleted scenes (spliced together frames to form a rough cut) with video commentary from the director before and after the scenes. There's also the Presto short from when the movie was in theaters and a short called Burn-E, which is a deleted scene that more or less evolved into a short (there's also an option to view it with story boards). I'm probably leaving something out, but you get the idea: there's a lot here. Not counting the 3 possible viewings of the film, there's well over 2 hours of high-definition content here. Disney probably has no intention of douple dipping with this film because this set is packed with stuff. If you enjoyed the film, I highly recommend picking it up.I went into Blu-ray with plenty of skepticism, but I've been pretty impressed so far, especially with Wall-E. It's a great movie that has gotten star treatment on Blu-ray.

I am floored. I didn't think it was possible for Pixar to surpass Toy Story, but it has. A sophisticated treat for adults and teens, a cuddly romance for the juice-box set, this comedic science fiction thriller romance (really!) takes the company to a new, more mature level. Filled with artistry, depth, meaning and a lot of humor, WALL-E is a masterpiece. Where Cars was a kid's movie with added adult themes, this is an adult movie with added value for children.DIALOGUE SCHMIALOGUEBefore I saw WALL-E I had read about the lack of dialogue, and how it might be a risky move for Pixar to make a film with characters that don't talk in a traditional sense. Well, trash that. The most emotionally powerful scenes in this movie are those with the LEAST dialogue. Fully developed and indeed almost human, the two main characters are Wall-E himself (the letters stand for Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class; there's also a WALL-A) and EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), two machines in love.After about a half hour I was wondering if Pixar could continue to pull off this less-is-more concept for the rest of the film -- then the two robots started playing Pong! Such imaginative screenplay carries the film to what should be a Best Picture nomination. Seriously.A TOUCHING STORYWALL-E is a lonely little robotic trash compactor who was left behind after Earth was abandoned some 700 years earlier. He has been methodically cleaning up the trash-ridden planet ever since, and harboring a tiny plant he has found among the garbage. Eve, meanwhile, lives on the immense spaceship Axiom, which is also home to the fat, blob-like remains of the human race. She is a probe robot that flies to Earth to determine if the planet is ready for habitation. WALL-E takes one look at the streamlined, angelic Eve and falls in love.It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the little robot. As soon as he giggled (after his pet cockroach tickled him) I was hooked. This hardworking rusty guy with his small home full of collected treasures is so poignant. His lonely life is so human. Eve is just as likable, but much more sleek. Near the end comes a heartbreaking moment when a key character seems to lose all personality, all self. So well done, it made me think of how families must feel when a loved one disappears inside him- or herself with Alzheimer's disease.All ends well, of course. As the credits roll, the artwork illustrates how everyone and everything lives happily after ever.AN ADULT MEANINGFor adults, WALL-E is not so much about a cute little robot as it is about the future of man. What happens when humans become such creatures of the consumer culture, so fat they can't even stand up without assistance, living literally on auto-pilot, that they do nothing but buy cheap merchandise, stuff their faces at the Regurgitated Food Buffet and lie around watching video screens? Can they ever get back to the land and set their souls free? Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young asked that question decades ago; Pixar asks it today.There is even a sly political reference. Broadcasting a message to the passengers of the spaceship, the CEO of monster corporation Buy 'n' Large -- played in live-action by the inimitable Fred Willard, and named Shelby Forthright -- says they will be continuing on their never-ending, hopeless cruise to nowhere because they must "Stay the course!" Hmmm, haven't I heard a president use that line?EXTRA TOUCHESWALL-E has so many wonderful touches! After the little robot is charged using his solar panels, he "turns on" with a sound any Macintosh owner will recognize. The robot's collected objects, much like the thingamabobs of The Little Mermaid's Ariel, are things that are uniquely human: bubble wrap, an iPod, a Rubics cube, a singing plastic trophy fish and -- blink and you'll miss it -- a carrousel horse from Walt Disney World. Especially inspired are the two things on this future Earth that are totally indestructible: a cockroach and Twinkies.Stay for the credits. Recalling cave drawings, hieroglyphics, Monet and Van Gogh paintings and early computer graphics, the progressive sequence of art within them sneaks in the history of dialogue-free storytelling.ANIMATED? REALLY?The look of the movie is hard to describe. In one scene, when WALL-E and EVE are investigating a piece of bubble wrap, you can't tell it is an animated film. It actually appears to be live-action. Likewise, the outer space scenes have the same level of realism as any of the Star Wars movies. The trailing tower of squiggly smoke that's left behind by a launching spacecraft re-creates the Florida sky of a Space Shuttle launch to a T. For the most part, it is only when humans are portrayed that you are consciously aware that what you're watching was generated on circuit boards, not in cameras.I've seen the movie three times, first in digital projection and then from a film projector. The digital showing was much sharper, which made all the realistic touches far easier to appreciate.MOVIE REFERENCESIt's obvious the Pixar folks are movie lovers; there are so many cinematic inspirations in WALL-E that I lost count. The "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" sequence from Hello, Dolly! shows up -- literally -- maybe half a dozen times. (Disney World fans may also remember the song as one of the background melodies along Main Street U.S.A.) The Axiom spaceship's computer is clearly an homage to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey; that film's signature overture "Also Sprach Zarathustra" plays at a key moment. WALL-E himself combines the purrs of E.T., the attitude of R2-D2 and the moves of Charlie Chaplin. There's a brief reference to Titanic.OPENING CARTOONThe movie is preceded by a Pixar short, "Presto," that had the entire audience I was sitting with in stitches. Its plot: When a magician neglects to feed his bunny a carrot, an escalating disaster results. It's so nice to start a feature with a cartoon. I wish other studios still did it. (Disney fans will note the magician's hat is similar to the one used by Mickey Mouse in Fantasia.)Will it ever run out? This continuous font of imagination from Pixar? With WALL-E, it sure doesn't look like it.-- By Julie Neal, author of The Complete Walt Disney World 2010.

Great movie and safe for kids to watch

An all-time classic