Forget wrinkly wrestlers, dairy campaigners, and chronologically challenged button boys, the most captivating character on screen this year was a mobile rubbish bin. Wall-E, the earth division Waste Allocation Load Lifter inspired audiences to both laughter and tears with a cosmic performance spanning loneliness, love, loss and liberation as the determination of this lowly refuse collector eventually saves the entire earth and gives humanity hope of a future.
It is a timeless tale of a friendless soul stuck in a dead-end job whose world is turned upside down by the arrival of a girl who gives a meaning to his existence. Wall-E lumbers along carrying out the futile task of endlessly compacting the mountains of debris left behind by the humans who abandoned the mess they created over 700 years previously in favour of a sanitized existence in space. This rusty robot not only carries heaps of rubble but also the weight of the entire film; with large portions of it consisting only of his warbling bleeps and Chaplin-esque clumsiness.
Wall-E falls for the mysteriously graceful EVE, a shiny emissary searching for signs of life, but just as she seems about to let him into her circuit-board heart the two lovers are cruelly pulled apart by forces stronger than gravity. In a masterful performance this endearing service machine transforms himself into the most unlikely of heroes, who, simply by following his heart manages to rescue both his beloved and the planet, as well as somewhere along the way reminding the humans what it is to be human.
I would have printed his acceptance speech here, but it was just a load of rubbish.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment