Here’s a sneak peek at my Top Fifteen of 2007: it won’t include Ratatouille. I still haven’t seen the latest Pixar film, which actually makes it the first Pixar I have not seen in theaters since A Bug’s Life. I would have liked to have seen it, but animated kid films don’t tend to appeal to me; even though I know that Pixar films are different and work much better than the Meet the Robinsons of the cinematic world, if it ain’t easy for me to see the CGI cartoon, I probably won’t see it. I may download the film on X-Box Live, who knows. Could happen.
I bring this up to explain the strange way that I am fascinated by WALL•E (Disney emails about the film point out the movie’s title must be all caps and with that dot in there. We live to serve!). Next year’s Pixar film, directed by Andrew Stanton, doesn’t feel like a kid movie at all. It feels like an art film – mostly silent and about a lonely robot living long after the end of humanity, WALL•E could be the film that helps bridge Pixar into more adult fare (and I don’t mean just violence and stuff – the John Carter of Mars movie will be probably rated harder than any previous Pixar film but will still be essentially a boy’s adventure story). And I have to admire Disney for being able to sell a movie like this to people, using the heartbreakingly cute image of sad eyed WALL•E on the teaser below. If they could get people into a movie about a cooking rat with an unspellable title, I’m sure they can get people into a mostly dialogue-free robot movie. Despite Cars it seems that Pixar is nowhere near out of goodness.
