I’ve been meaning to post something about WALL•E for a while now — and I will post something, I hope, in the near future — but life has been busy and the mountain of WALL•E commentary to sift through has grown impossibly large.
In the meantime, however, I commend to you this piece by Noah Millman, who lists many of the flaws with this film that had occurred to me already as well as many that hadn’t, before concluding:
I may be grading WALL•E too hard, measuring it by the apparent scale of its ambitions rather than rating it against other kiddie flicks of the season, but that’s what higher ambitions will get you: more serious critical attention. And WALL•E, while it has wonderful things about it – just for having brought back the silent movie, it deserves high praise – just didn’t impress me as the work of art it’s being praised as.
There is some interesting discussion in the comments, too.
I am also somewhat relieved to find that as esteemed an animation expert as Jerry Beck seems to share my mild reaction to the film, acknowledging that there is much to “admire” in the film, as there usually is in a Pixar movie, but that it also left him “a little cold” and “a little disappointed”.
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