Delayed Reaction: Wall-E

Premise: Set in a distant future, a small trash compacting robot roaming an empty Earth comes to learn about the fate of humanity in space, but all he really wants to do is get cozy with a robot named EVE sent to determine if Earth is inhabitable.

I'm a stupid person.

I saw Wall-E shortly after it was released on video and I weakly hated it. I've always had a distaste about movies that run with the theory that humanity is the worst. I also have a short fuse for lazy anti-capitalist messages. So, the second half of Wall-E rubbed me the wrong way. I'm still not entirely over that aspect of it, but I have softened on it.

So, I finally got around to rewatching Wall-E. Damn, that's a lovely movie. Knowing what to expect going in made it a lot easier to appreciate all that's good about the movie. The beginning is excellent and can't be praised enough. I have a major weakness for non-dialogue story-telling. It really is crazy that Pixar snuck this into a blockbuster movie targeted at children. Wall-E manages to be funny, sympathetic, and brave without ever saying more than his name. This is A+ stuff.

The movie still loses me a bit once it moves to the spaceship, but it's still reasonably enjoyable. The best parts continue to be about the robots, not the humans.

Wall-E remains only mid-tier Pixar for me - below most Toy Stories, Up, Coco, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille at least. However, that speaks more to how much I like other Pixar movies than it does about the quality of Wall-E. It's certainly above the Cars sequels, The Good Dinosaur, and Monsters University, which I couldn't definitively say before this rewatch.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend