When Criterion made the announcement that WALL-E would be added to the collection this November it was like a school cafeteria went quiet. The cacophony had turned to silence. Murmurs and speculation followed. Could this lead to future Criterion/Disney projects? Perhaps. Though, Criterion mostly avoids animated films so this could just be a one and done on account of Andrew Stanton pride.
The director of WALL-E reached out to Criterion because he loves the label and believed his film should be part of its collection. Call it being boastful about his work or having a large ego, Stanton is not wrong. And I’m sure he’s not the only filmmaker who has wanted to see his or her work entrusted with such a boutique label.
For the high-def consumer the big deal is learning the main feature gets a visual boost with Dolby Vision / HDR10+ enhancement, something Disney has only incorporated into a few of its titles in 4K. The other attraction is seven new extras to go along with almost all of the ones produced back in 2008. If those are enough to steer you to purchase, then what are you waiting for?
WALL-E is a beautiful film. Do I love it? If replay value was the deciding factor, then the answer would be no. But I’d argue it is still one of Pixar’s best on account of what it manages to do visually and in overall execution. Next to the prologue of UP, the first 30 minutes of WALL-E is one of the best opening acts of any feature. It takes nearly 24 minutes until the audience hears any English dialogue. And yet you can’t helped but be pulled in by what is seemingly monotonous.
A Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class (WALL-E, for short) is the last robot left on Earth. Its programmed mission is to clean up the planet, making one little trash cube at a time. Human civilization has long since jettisoned for outer space as collected garbage has grown to such exorbitant levels where plants can no longer sprout. For 700 years, WALL-E has been making trash cubes. When he isn’t making cubes, he’s picking up items in an Igloo container and adding them to his random collection of odds and ends at his home base. Among the items is a copy of the 1964 musical HELLO, DOLLY! The Pixar film opens to the musical number “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and by the time it finishes we have a sense that this WALL-E is more than just a trash compactor. He’s curious and inquisitive, and being both just doesn’t fit with his original programming: to be autonomous in work and life. Then he encounters EVE (an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) and it becomes love at first droid.
Upon re-watches, the film operates not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s FULL METAL JACKET. Both have a two-story structure. WALL-E establishes an environment of self-sufficiency and growth. FMJ’s boot camp training at Parris Island is about homogenizing men and making them function the same through torment and abuse. Incidentally, the human characters in WALL-E are made similar through comfort and convenience. Living in outer space on what can be described as a luxury cruise liner, humans have no motivator to be productive. Once WALL-E and his unrequited love go up into space, the film turns into a high-paced search-and-rescue story, thus disrupting the task-oriented bots and the human sloths. Whereas, FMJ drops the platoon of U.S. Marines into the Vietnam War and we see how war affects each man.
The two halves work on different levels, but the fusion of both allows audience to experience what Andrew Stanton had intended: arthouse appreciation with big Hollywood flair.
For young, modern audiences, WALL-E will be a gateway to silent cinema. When this epiphany sets in it will be a eureka moment. The same thing happened to me as a kid with WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? I was watching a film noir and didn’t even know it. Now I credit director Robert Zemeckis as the reason why I love noir cinema.
While I can think of a few other Pixar titles worthy of the Criterion seal of approval (TOY STORY is the easiest of choices), WALL-E’s technical merits and the story’s coalescence of silence and whiz-bang commotion – as well as the parallel of evolution and devolution between robot and man and how a little disorder can break loneliness – make the film an unexpectedly unsurprising fit for the label.
WALL-E comes in a gateway fold-out DigiPack with the special features spread across all three discs (one 4K UHD and two Blu-rays). Comparing extras found with the original 2008 Blu-ray and 2020 4K UHD releases, all seem to have been ported over except for three: “Presto,” the short that played before WALL-E in theaters, a “Photo Gallery,” and “3D Set Fly-Throughs.” As replacement to the Presto omission we have “A Story” (1987), a student film from Stanton as a senior at California Institute of the Arts.
We get close to two hours of new supplemental featurettes including a candid interview with Stanton talking about his influences and how working as a theater usher helped inspire the cinematic language of WALL-E. Another extra takes us into the vaults of Pixar where Stanton unboxes his personal sketchbook and early concept art among other items, all of which allows him to tell stories about his life and career.
Ralph Eggleston, a production designer who passed in August, is celebrated in a piece about color scripts. Eggleston helped develop color scripts for WALL-E, TOY STORY, and FINDING NEMO, and was important in getting Stanton one of his first jobs in animation.
A new feature on directing animation offers a brief look-see at twelve scenes in WALL-E, while another provides a short masterclass with Stanton guiding us through the sequence where EVE discovers the last remaining plant on Earth.
Much like The Simpsons has predicted the future time and again, “WALL-E: A to Z” shows some of the ways the 2008 film would foreshadow reality. The human characters being inseparable from computer tablets is undeniable.
Finally, inside the DigiPack is a booklet containing the essay “Trash Planet” written by Sam Wasson (co-author of HOLLYWOOD: THE ORAL HISTORY) and technical details about the Criterion release.
WALL-E is an amazing addition to the Criterion Collection, and being part of the label raises the artistic awareness of animation – a medium that is regrettably misconstrued as a genre meant for young audiences.
Now the deciding factor for owners of the 2020 4K UHD: Is it worth a double-dip? If you don’t care about new extras, the Criterion brand, or are not a die-hard fan, then there’s no need to upgrade. But even without the “Presto” short, this is the most definitive release on the market with seven new extras plus three short vignettes from 2008 not found on the original Blu-ray edition.
Hopefully, like the ending of CASABLANCA, this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Criterion and Disney, and not a one-and-done.
Move Score: A
Extras Score: A+
