xparrot | trash-compacting robots are LOV·E

Got back to Kyoto last night, jet-lagged as anything today *yawn*. One of the things I did on my visit stateside was catch a couple movies not yet released in Japan, The Dark Knight, which was good, if so damn dark I'm not sure I enjoyed it (but I still adore Gary Oldman's Gordon, and all the accolades Heath Ledger's Joker got are well-deserved); and WALL·E (not out in Japan until December! Why, Japan?)

Concerning WALL-E. First, I must qualify that, one, I loved Short Circuit as a kid, and two, Pixar has owned my soul since the first Toy Story. They consistently produce some of the most gorgeous, touching, creative films ever made. CGI movies are a dime a dozen nowadays, but Pixar isn't about CGI; they're about art and story, as told with computer animation. They have only two settings: "great", and "flipping phenomenal."

WALL-E is the latter. It might be their best yet, and I say that after having watched The Incredibles about a dozen times and still not tired of it. I say I don't cry at movies. I should change that to "don't cry at movies that aren't Pixar's," because I was fighting tears for about the first ten minutes of WALL-E. And the last ten minutes. And several places in the middle. I'm practically tearing up just remembering certain moments.

Not that it's a sad movie, it isn't. It's frighteningly depressing in places, but it's also ridiculously cute, laugh-out-loud funny, breathtakingly beautiful, and hopeful to the point of heartbreaking; and half the time you're crying it's tears of joy. It makes you despair for our species, and makes you proud to be human. It's about how everything changes eventually, and even endings come to an end, come to new beginnings. It's about loneliness and individualism and realizing beauty. It's about how love conquers all, how life conquers all.

And yes, ultimately, it's a love story, a good old-fashioned boy-robot-meets-girl-robot tale, in the best of ways. This is how you do romance - this is how you do science fiction, this is how you do animation. This is how you make a movie.

(Also it will make you love a cockroach. Because Pixar is special like that. I think they challenge themselves: "Well, in Finding Nemo we made people cry for fish within three minutes, and then in Ratatouille we showed how adorable rats really are. How do we top that? Wait, I know!")