WALL·E

When I first saw WALL·E in theaters three summers ago (was it really three whole Pixar movies ago?), it immediately became one of my favorite G-rated/kids movies. Cute, moving, endearing - if you've seen it you know what I mean, and if you haven't you've surely heard all about it. So I guess I don't need to waste any time lauding more praise on WALL·E three years after the fact. Instead, let's talk about whether or not certain movies can "hold up" after a good amount of time has passed. Because I'm amazed to say that WALL·E kind of doesn't. It mostly does. But the whole bit about Earth becoming too polluted to sustain life, and people becoming far too out of shape to even walk on their own two legs - that aspect of the movie kind of clashes with the modern day focus on health and environmentalism. It's kind of like how 1984 still reads like a classic but feels incredibly dated while Brave New World doesn't. Brave New World focuses primarily on a dystopian future in which materialism and media have run amok, which is a future we're still conceivably heading toward. 1984 deals with a world run by one totalitarian regime projecting a guise of being three separate warring superpowers. While that could still ultimately happen (anything is possible!) it just seems a whole lot less likely given the current political snapshot of the globe. (And it certainly didn't happen by 1984!) So while both are great books, one feels more dated than the other. And although three years is hardly a long enough timeframe with which to judge whether or not a movie will end up being more "timeless" or "dated," WALL·E is already showing some slight signs of age in a way that most other Pixar movies aren't. And whether or not that's a big deal is in the eye of the beholder. Three years is longer than it feels sometimes; when this movie debuted, the most recent Olympic Games had taken place in Turin, Italy, neither Lady Gaga nor Katy Perry had ever had a number one hit, and Barack Obama had only just won the Democratic primary election on his way to the U.S. Presidency. So we can forgive it for feeling a tad dated already. But it does feel a tad dated already nonetheless. That's my only point. All said and done though, I still consider it to be one of my favorite Pixar movies. Toy Story 3 did manage to surpass it last summer, but I'll get to that movie soon enough.