stephbg | Cartoon violence, just what I needed

Am tremendously pleased I made it to the WALL-E screening this evening.

Laughed uproariously and continually through the opening short. Angry bunnies. Priceless. Rendered slightly more surreal by the dance number featured in last night's SYTYCD finale entitled "Homage to rabbits killed by incompetant magicians". Proudly presented by Circ de WTF.

Many laughs of the classic cartoon/silent film variety in the feature, plus a bonus round of tech jokes throughout. Knowledge of Buster Keaton, Steve Jobs and the Russian space program an advantage. Amazingly well done to extract such a huge range of emotions from machine characters (certainly far more than from the blobby human cast).

The environmental/consumerist themes--hardly subtext--were acceptably rendered on the whole. The odd rare moments of schmaltz near the end were cut short as soon as I reminded myself the emotionally laden scenes were being delivered by robots and without dialogue at that (and in a few cases, a cockroach (for whom I developed an unhealthy attachment)). That's damn fine direction.

I completely failed to identify the 2nd 2nd assistant director, foley artists and transportation captain in the credits as there was far too much else of interest going on. I did notice a frighteningly large number of production babies.

I may have to track down all of Husband's copies of Hello Dolly and destroy them. And burn the sheet music. We have that too.