Old dogs and children and watermelon wine tom t hall

Old dogs and children and watermelon wine tom t hall

Yes, its funny. Its just not Kung Fu Panda funny. And while I thoroughly enjoyed Kung Fu Panda, WALL-E is a transporting experience. The director and co-writer, Andrew Stanton, was the primary force behind Pixars all-time box office champ, Finding Nemo. WALL-E is the sort of picture an ambitious talent makes after hes delivered an enormous hit. Stantons co-writer is Jim Reardon, a longtime contributor to and director on The Simpsons. The two sensibilities fold together seamlessly, and while the second half of the film is less amazing and more familiar than the first, its nonetheless a gratifying reminder that in some sectors of the global entertainment industry quality remains job one. WALL-E peers 700 years into the future and sees an uninhabitable trash heap. Humankind has given in to the pernicious influence of a single global corporation, Buy n Large in digital snippets Fred Willard plays its hearty, slippery CEO. In addition to running the robot cleanup concession, Buy n Large owns a fleet of spaceship cruisers offering refuge for the last remaining humans. The main spaceship is the Axiom, akin to a Holland America liner the size of Holland. Awaiting the word that Earth is once again habitable, the ship spends year after year in space, sustaining the last remaining humans blobby, pampered creatures who never get out of their whiz-bang flying loungers long enough to look at what theyve become. We dont see any of this, or meet the ships captain voiced by Jeff Garlin, until were well into WALL-E. The first 30 minutes are pure bittersweet magic. On the soundtrack, incongruously, Michael Crawford sings the opening bars of Put On Your Sunday Clothes from Hello, Dolly! The lyrics promise adventure in the evening air, but as director Stanton zooms down to reveal what appears to be Manhattan, old dogs and children and watermelon wine tom t hall with the wreckage of ancient skyscrapers as well as towering skyscrapers of garbage, the air doesnt look so promising. WALL-E, who resembles the mechanical love child of old dogs and children and watermelon wine tom t hall Mini-Me, goes about his business, collecting, compacting and stacking cubes of trash. He is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, and he has a pet cockroach who accompanies him on his sorting excursions. He sees something he likes, he keeps it: a Rubiks Cube, a spork and his prized possession, a Betamax copy of Hello, Dolly! From this one musical he has gleaned what his robot life lacks: a little romance. And then comes EVE, an Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, who initially cant seem to stop blasting everything with her laser gun. WALL-E shares a couple of traits with last summers Pixar masterwork, Ratatouille, namely a twisty, non-formulaic narrative structure and a hostile, occasionally violent female sparring partner for the male lead. Shes programmed to look for plant life, and WALL-E has found it: a single house plant he keeps in an old boot in his trailer home. From there the film whisks both robots and the plant off to EVEs origin, the good ship Axiom. Changing gears effortlessly, WALL-E pits the human captain against his mutinous robot assistant shades of 2001 well, more like an entire chunk, and depicts a whirring beehive of activity, recalling the factory sequences from Pixars Monsters, Inc. The second tier of robot characters isnt especially memorable, and the story amps up the chaos at a predictable point in the story, old dogs and children and watermelon wine tom t hall WALL-E and EVE become rogues on the lam. As with Ratatouille, which shifted its focus midpoint from critter Remy to human Linguini, WALL-E introduces the captain about halfway through, and while the goggle-eyed, musical-comedy-loving hero of the title isnt sidelined, hes required to share the story with a lot of other characters.