Movie Review of the Week: Wall-E

Summertime is full of traditions - baseball, fireworks and outdoor grilling, to name a few - and it seems like new traditions emerge all the time. For instance, every summer, when the corn stalks have just grown to reach knee height, and right after Brette Favre indicates that he intends to come out of retirement, Pixar studios releases an excellent film.

It has happened again this year. Wall-E is on par with everything else Pixar has produced, which means that it is a blue-ribbon movie. And unlike other Pixar movies, this one has a real, live, in-the-flesh appearance by none other than Fred Willard. Yes, in a pioneering move, real Fred is inserted amidst the animation, a la Mary Poppins, playing the role of president of BuyNLarge (a fictitious corporation with a very convincing website).

The entire film is, unfortunately, set to a dramatic backdrop of man-made, corporate-sponsored, environmental armageddon. The term "unfortunately" is deliberately chosen here in place of "tragically", because the politically sensitive theme doesn't kill the movie, and the plot-line and overall message of Wall-E aren't really what could be called "AlGorey". Just the same, promoting any sort of environmentalist message, no matter how tame, seems in today's society to be analogous to promoting an anti-witchcraft message in colonial Massachusetts. In a vacuum, both messages are potentially valuable; but in context, they're just problematic. I am sorry, but I have to dock Wall-E one star just for flirting with the subject. So that's 3 stars to Wall-E. Could have been 4, Pixar! Good thing for you, nobody cares about my opinions...