In a brilliant bit of marketing, Disney played on the cult popularity of the sci-fi film, ALIEN, with the tagline: “In space, no one can hear you clean.” Given the laws of gravity, I imagine as much is true. This touching story of a robot who manages to teach humanity about what it means to be human become one of the most acclaimed films ever produced by Pixar and Disney.

The film was a technological achievement in and of itself. Directed by Andrew Stanton, the director of FINDING NEMO, WALL-E pushed the limits of what Pixar was capable of producing. Stanton insisted the film replicate the visual depth of focus and detail of 70mm film — a task never attempted before. Consequently, this required exhaustive layering and rendering man-hours.

Unlike most films today, dialogue is not the meat of the story. In fact, it is more like a silent film in that the dialogue is almost irrelevant — you can feel with the expressions of the characters alone. Stanton intentionally kept the dialogue to a minimum, often only scripting emotional states and gestures. This allowed the animators to have a broader range of motion and placed the onus of communicating the emotions of the characters on legendary sound designer Ben Burtt.

The evocative sound design and sumptuous visual helped propel WALL-E to the top of the box office. In fact, it managed to earn $23 million on its opening day. By the close of its opening weekend, it had made over $63 million. By the end of the year, the worldwide take was well over $534 million. This was a tremendous hit for Pixar, marking the film as the highest grossing animated feature to date.

Most film critics nationwide lauded the film — and for good reason. In fact, WALL-E not only won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, but it also took home the Hugo Award for best Dramatic Presentation. The cap off its impressive awards run, it also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Few films in recent history have elicited as much positive emotion as WALL-E. If you are eager to add it to your collection, you would be well advised to opt for the lush Blu-ray edition. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

Tags: ,