Yet more on WALL•E.

"Technically, WALL•E is indeed a marvel, especially the long, nearly wordless opening sequence that shows the title character, a trash-collecting robot, going about his lonely labors on an environmentally devastated Earth," writes Reed Johnson. "But this G-rated movie, with its lovable protagonist and ultimately reassuring message about mankind's fate, also strikes me as something of an evasion, a retreat from the knottier issues and themes raised in 2001 and other classic sci-films of the 60s and 70s, such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and Silent Running (1972)."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "I'm a conservative, and I just love the movie WALL•E," announces Charlotte Allen, noting that "WALL•E doesn't mark the first time that critics on the right have unloaded inexplicably on a piece of popular entertainment that you would think would appeal to their conservative ideals.... The irony of all this is that if WALL•E is didactic, what it has to teach is profoundly conservative."

Updated through 7/18.

David Denby in the New Yorker: "WALL•E blends two kinds of science fiction - the post-apocalyptic disaster scenario and the dystopian fantasy derived from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which people are controlled not by coercion but by pleasure.... WALL•E is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible."

"There's nothing wrong with the film's anti-corporatism, which is just a variation of the anti-totalitarianism that's requisite to the genre," argues Ben Crair in the New Republic. "More troublesome is the film's complicity in the commodified culture it ostensibly critiques. This isn't about Disney, whose external merchandise and marketing are extraneous to the film's artistic vision. Within the movie itself, WALL•E betrays its true corporate overlord, and it isn't Mickey. It's Apple."

"If the pattern of the past seven years prevails, WALL•E will be nominated for the Best Animated Feature category; if justice prevails, it will win," predicts the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern. "But WALL•E isn't just an animated feature; it's a great motion picture by any measure, and has already been hailed as such - by critics who've called it a masterpiece (I'm one of them), by audiences who watch it in a state of enthrallment (which is one notch up from enchantment). In keeping with its singular distinction, Pixar's latest gift to movie lovers should be a candidate for the most prestigious award, Best Picture, when Oscar time rolls around. And the time to start the drumbeat is now, because the path to that nomination is strewn with prickly practicalities and marked by timeworn doubts." Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Update, 7/15: Ambrose Heron talks with directing animator Angus MacLane.

Updates, 7/18: The British papers welcome the robot to the UK: Xan Brooks (Guardian), Dave Calhoun (Time Out), James Christopher (Times), Ryan Gilbey (New Statesman), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard), Anthony Quinn (Independent) and Sukhdev Sandhu (Telegraph).

Wendy Ide talks with Sigourney Weaver for the London Times.

Posted by dwhudson at July 14, 2008 3:27 PM