by Chris Feil
It’s a rare thing for a Disney film to borrow music for a film rather than provide original material, but Pixar’s Wall-E is an even rarer brand of masterpiece. Today, on its tenth anniversary, it is still as sublime an experience for the senses as it ever was.
When the film opens with a musical theatre classic, we are told instantly that we are in for a different kind of science fiction world view. Its nearly dialogue free visual storytelling has been rightly lauded, detailing the a polluted post-evacuation earth through the robots left behind. But one crucial and charming aspect to the silent love story it tells is how swiftly it reveals character through its needle drops...
The film begins with Hello, Dolly!’s “Put On Your Sunday Clothes”, the song detailing a sense of purpose in how you greet the world. We see instantly reflected in the film’s boxy, bug-eyed sweetheart as he zips about his tasks with curiosity and enthusiasm. Later we see that the musical is among Wall-E’s treasured remnants, a constantly revisited obsession that has educated him on the world he inhabits. To us, the song’s optimism is how the world was, but Wall-E’s conviction proves how it can still be. As much as you could call the song’s outlook old-fashioned or simplistic, Wall-E will spend the rest of the film showing the clear-eyed humanity that he’s taken from it.
For Wall-E longs to connect. The Hello, Dolly! track that further reveals this android’s personality is “It Only Takes A Moment”, which he watches intently, allowing the song to sing him to sleep as he wishes for someone to share this big world with. It’s that simple, isn’t it? We just want to love and be loved. In the film’s desolate landscape, it’s protagonist finds the deepest seed of human truth in the melody of a love song.
And when the heroine Eve arrives on Earth, that “love at first sight” he was promised comes true. Eve, perhaps wisely (and without a song of her own), takes a minute to warm up to the dope. More classic romanticism christens their meet-cute with Louis Armstrong’s version “La Vie En Rose”, with Wall-E showing his clumsy affections and her committed drive - the sweetness of the song all the more swoony in this opposites attract narrative.
The film’s musical originality lives mostly in Thomas Newman’s alternately twitchy and sweeping score, especially in the glorious “Define Dancing” sequence. Newman is omnipresent throughout, but here he gives the love story ground to stand (or dance) on beyond the groundwork of Wall-E’s favorite musical. And much as the B-story of Hello, Dolly! ignited Wall-E’s heartstrings, the romance between Wall-E and Eve inspires a budding love story in the film’s B-story, the humans John and Mary.
Wall-E’s musical Oscar chances were dashed by the sweep of Slumdog Millionaire, but the film’s closer “Down to Earth” by Peter Gabriel provides more lingering contextual notes than “Jai Ho”’s still convincing ebullience. As we’ve watched the film’s love story unfold, its subtext is how the impulse for connection is the most vital lifesource in human existence. Gabriel’s song invites us to get in touch with the planet and eachother, bringing the narrative full circle.
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