We’re kicking this article off with our review of the Wall-E feature itself — naturally you can jump right to our extensive analysis of the BLU-RAY or 3 DISC DVD if you like…

WALL-E 3-DISC BLU-RAY REVIEW
Feature Time: 98 minutes
Rated: G
Studio: Disney Pixar

Thanks to mass industrialization and consumption of everything natural, we have destroyed out planet, and all that’s left is a wasteland of junk. Our junk. This is in the distant future right, or is it? In some areas of the world, you’d think it was today. But luckily in a Pixar future near you, they invent Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), a robot designed to clean-up our planet by compacting into bite-sized cubes. Sadly the fleet of Wall-E’s have broken down except one to erect skyscrapers and cities of junk and rummaging through our remains. Dun-dun-Daaah!

In the ninth Pixar film, humans vacate the planet to live in outer space but deploy robots called EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) to come back to the Earth from time-to-time to see if vegetation can survive again prompting lazy, overgrown humans to shuttle back home to inhabit the once green and blue planet. Leave it to someone else to do the work, right? Many years have past, far too many to count, but a large corporation called Buy and Large, initiated all of this consumerism and consumption and eventually became the governing body feeding people more things to keep them locked in a seat, fat with information and virtual expferiences so that no one has to lift a finger ever again.

One day, our lone Wall-E finds a tiny plant living in a refrigerator and places it in his collection of human trinkets, unbeknownst to him that it is one thing everyone is after, everything with a heartbeat that is. After the latest deployment of EVEs, Wall-E befriends one of them as it’s the first companion he’s had on the planet besides his tiny friend, Roach, and takes a certain liking to her. She is everything he’s not: He roves around, she flies, he’s utterly defenseless, she has laser cannons, he has a nostalgic personality with one primary function, she is an aggressive Type-A robot thinking of only of completing her mission.

When Wall-E shares his latest find with EVE, it completes her mission and a spacecraft comes back to pick her up taking Wall-E into picturesque outer space to the human ship. The second act begins and we find out just how lazy humans are and how dependent they’ve become to robots and electronics. Wall-E meets other bots with other singular functions, all of which are adorable. Once the “head” robots discover that EVE was successful, their stranglehold over the humans will end. The final act and struggle to activate the return sequence back to Earth depends on Wall-E, EVE, and the Captain of the ship, a human, to save the day and send everyone home feeling good about being green and keep Al Gore singing “Zippity Do-Dah” and “Kumbayah ”

What is extraordinary about Wall-E is the way they tell the story through minimal verbal communication, almost child-like. They did the same thing on the cartoon Pokemon but at an incredibly annoying level where all the creatures could only say their name with different inflections. Thankfully the robots have a slightly larger vocabulary and do some imaginative things with the way they move, different postures, and the facial expressions which may just be a slight change in the eyes to a tiny mechanical part moving. At first it was frustrating because it was just Wall-E and Roach by themselves and you’re trying to take in the drastic scenery of Earth, and hardly a word was spoken. But once EVE dropped and everything raced to the spaceship, the strain of communication becomes a bit of a charming quality to Wall-E. It allows younger audiences into it at their level, but gives older audiences to figure out.

All Pixar films have a pretty wholesome little message in them even if we don’t want to really be aware of that when watching them. But it’s hard to look past how the metropolitan landscape of the Earth in act one came to be that way. The super-consumerism lifestyle promised and delivered by corporate gluttony leading to the downfall of mankind. How humans can reject the organic world around them and become mindless, overgrown babies is not a reality now, but there’s a plausible chance we are headed towards that–enough for Wall-E to make people pause and think.

Wall-E is full of contrasting things: natural vs. synthetic, the sleek, curvilinear, do everything Eve vs. the boxy, mono-purpose relic Wall-E, And even though they are robots, they are patterned off a male and female traits. Robots appear to have more emotion than humans and humans have become more robotic. Even though this is a Pixar film, and it’s aimed at the most general audience, Wall-E is an all-ages open love letter to the often misunderstood science fiction genre with nods to Star Trek, 2001: Space Odyssey, Alien, Short Circuit, Star Wars, and the list goes on. Wall-E’s collection in his trailer is filled with things geeks and nerds could only ramble on for hours about. I should know, I’m one of them; and both Wall-E and EVE (and M-O) have the warmth and glow of every other Pixar animated character because that’s just what they do best.

What would you do if you were the last living thing on the planet? What if there’s no other life on the universe but our own? Are we making ourselves obsolete with robotic technology? Will we be taken over by machines? What are we doing to our planet? What kind of life would it be to live in outer space? The answers to these questions are endless and is the very heart of the science fiction movie. We have to let ourselves go to imagine before we can discover, we have to think before we come to solutions, and sometimes we have to have an old fashioned romance to see the brilliance of a much-maligned genre and I’ll break it down even simpler, it’s Pixar, and there is little doubt you won’t like it.

OVERALL SHOCK VALUE — Blu-Ray: A+ / DVD: A-

If you were to buy one, and not be ale to compare it to the other, you wouldn’t know the differences, but I can tell you, there’s a big winner when you put them head to head.

First off, we know that the audio and video are going to be better in high definition, but the audio is on another level. The Dolby Digital soundtrack is enjoyable, but the DD True-HD audio track envelopes you, reproducing the theater experience, which is what we’re all after, no?The video has that extra pop, that luster and clarity that will make people drop their jaw, but let it be said that the DVD when up-converted, looks damn good too. In the extras department, the DVD will have plenty to entertain the family or yourself many times over, but the blu-ray will have you coming back to watch the film with different types of commentaries (not just audio) and the 8-Bit video games are simple, yet addicting.

When able to compare the two formats, I still like the creativity put into the presentation of the DVDs, the packaging, and the menus, but that’s the only edge the DVD has over the blu-ray. Studios are finding more ways to creatively put extra material to make it worth the extra bucks for the blu-ray. Regardless of format, Wall-E is a no brainer that shines in both home versions but know in purchasing the DVD, you may be double-dipping eventually because the blu-ray is a winning performer in the complete movie experience that maximizes your home theater and rewards you with exclusive, time-worthy extras.

DVD VS BLU-RAY

Choose your format and read on for extensive disc by disc analysis — presentation, audio, video, extras & exclusives!

• WALL-E — BLU-RAY REVIEW
• WALL-E — 3 DISC DVD REVIEW