A good week for sci-fi cartoon nerds

So I saw WALL•E last night. Really, really good. It’s no secret that I’m a ridiculously big Pixar fan, but it seems like no matter how high I get my hopes up, my expectations are always met or exceeded. This time my expectations were only met (Ratatouille, by contrast, really surprised me), but that’s saying a lot since it’s all I talked or thought about for a week before. What’s wrong with me?

Every time I leave the theater after one of these movies I ask myself how it fits in (ranking-wise) with the rest of the Pixar canon, but last night I realized that for all the similarities in Pixar’s films, they really do fill completely different positions. None of their films are vying for the same slot. Even Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are completely different, thematically – Toy Story is a bout a toy worrying about being fun enough for his kid; Toy Story 2 is this dark contemplation of mortality and coming to terms with being outgrown. Incredibles is about family, but not in the same way that Ratatouille is.

WALL•E is, first and foremost (and unexpectedly for Pixar), a love story. And such a good one. And Pixar’s never really done one of those before, in the A-Plot at least. The ways in which WALL•E discovers his capacity for love, and teaches it to everyone he comes in contact with is heartbreakingly poignant and wonderful. And all without the “robot sheds a real tear” or “humans just don’t understand” or “let’s tell a regular love story but make it about robots” crap you might expect from another studio *cough*eamWorks. This is a movie about robots. It wouldn’t work with humans or animals. Which is why Pixar is so phenomenal – nothing is arbitrary. They care about what they’re saying and they make choices that better tell their story. And what a story.

Pixar never ceases to amaze me with their capacity for dealing with dark themes and presenting convincing and optimistic conclusions, and WALL•E is no exception- this film paints a pretty bleak picture of the Earth’s future without being grotesque, and contemplating WALL•E’s being alone for 700 years is more than a little disturbing. But, like Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo, the film manages to gesture to the darkness just enough that we know it’s there, and then gives us a world and a story in which it’s possible to do the right thing, to make the right choices, and to overcome the fear and loneliness to create something better. You know, like our own world.

In other news, it was a big week for nerds like myself – the new Futurama DVD was released on Tuesday. Not bad at all, although it’s a little bit of a mess. The plots aren’t prioritized very well, so you get a ton of stuff going on that is given the same amount of weight, and it can get to be a slog at times. Plus, I’m very, very concerned about the handful of distinctly Family Guy-esque bits in this film, including such gems as:

(Crazy thing is in the sky)

Guy: It’s a bird!

Lady: It’s a plane!

Superman: I’m out of here! (Flies off)

Weak sauce, Futurama. This better not become a regular thing.

Still, though. I’m loathe to complain about more Futurama.

Oh, Chim-Chim. When will you learn?

So I caught a preview screening of Speed Racer on Saturday with Genevieve and my friend Dan. Dan despised the film, drawing out the closed-eyes “h” in “hhhhhhhorrible” to effectively illustrate his point.

I actually liked it. It’s a gorgeous movie, and it’s great to see so much effort and talent put into what is unabashedly a kids’ movie. It’s about 20 minutes too long, mostly due to a couple repetitive racing scenes (which I can’t complain too much about) and a few drawn-out sappy dialogue scenes – which aren’t a deal-breaker for me anyway. It’s nice to see that the Wachowskis care enough about their characters to spend a few extra minutes on them, even if dialogue isn’t their strong point.

But from a cinematic perspective, I’d say it left more of an impression on me than Matrix. It’s absolutely amazing visually. They use colors I’m not sure I was aware existed.

And props to them for using a real chimpanzee instead of animating some uncanny-valley monstrosity. Somehow, a chimp in a tuxedo or pajamas just refuses to stop being hilarious.

So, yeah. Watch it. Unless you have little patience for the corny pitfalls of kids’ movies.