wall-e

Bit of a different order for things this week, so I'm doing the usual Wednesday film review on a Tuesday.

The film in question was WALL-E, which is a CGI film by Pixar.

I have a bit of a tough time with Pixar's films. There are some that I really like, but a lot of them I don't think quite live up to the hype surrounding them. A good example of this is the Incredibles, which I found very disappointing.

Which isn't to say I didn't like it, it's more like it didn't seem as good as it could have been. Another example is Finding Nemo - I just found it a bit disappointing and, if I'm honest, rather predictable.

I dunno, maybe it's because all of Pixar's films are essentially kid's films. Finding Nemo in particular you've got a father loosing his son and trying to find him. I mean, was there ever any doubt that he would find him?

Now don't get me wrong- even if it wasn't animated or it wasn't a kid's film, if that was the core plot it'd be extremely unlikely not to have a successful outcome. I dunno - it's difficult to explain.

I think the best I can cover it is that the jeopardy in Finding Nemo is false because there's that inevitability. However, if you'd got to the end and Nemo had suggested he wanted to stay where he was then I'd have been interested in that jeopardy.

I'm babbling - the point I'm coming round to is that WALL-E didn't disappoint me. I really enjoyed it. The writing in particular was superb.

One of the things I liked about it is that when they do these films they often bits for the adult - gags or whatever that kids won't get but that let the parents enjoy it a bit more. Well, in WALL-E, they didn't r really need to do that, because it's a more grown up story.

It's a love story, essentially, and I'm not sure Pixar have really tackled a love story like this before.

I will say that I did have a couple of reservations about the film, but they were more from me being a pedant about stuff than actual problems.

I won't go into detail over these, but one of the ones that did kinda puzzle me was towards the end. It's not really a spoiler as all I'll say is that there's a part where the ship they end up on gets tilted to the side and all the humans slide out of their chairs.

The basic idea is that all the people have become fat and feeble from having everything done for them. This includes walking and they all kinda sit in these automatic wheel chairs (we'll leave how they defecate out of proceedings).

Anyway, so the idea is the ship tilts, they all slide out of their chairs and then down the floor. Okay, it sorta works. Except think about this - in space there is no "up". It's clearly shown in other bits that there's no gravity in space and so the suggestion is that there's an artificial gravity system at work somewhere.

But wouldn't that gravity system be orientated along the axis of the ship? Which is to say, if you tilt the ship, you tilt the gravity too, so from the perspective of the humans in the chairs, there should be no sense of leaning.

Even if you come up with some reason for that, then why aren't the chairs affected too? Even if you say they're anchored in place, they should lean in the opposite direction if that stays fixed. So in other words, there's no way in which the chairs would upend and evict their users.

Another one that didn't quite make sense was that WALL-E and EVE end up in a trash compactor that's basically flinging all the ship's waste otut into space. And yet they've been in space for 700 years - wouldn't they have run out of raw materials if the ship was designed to just dump waste into space, rather than recycle/reuse it?

But as I say, these things don't affect the core story and you can happily ignore them as otherwise it's very, very good.