unexciting

Oh Dear. Poor Pixar. They should have swiftly edited Wall-E and removed or replaced John Ratzenberger's bits so that they could then later claim that it was the absence of their lucky charm which caused the film to be somewhat more bobbins than one might reasonably expect. The characterisation of Wall-E is good but it's a little bit limited and could reasonably have been squeezed into a short. There's altogether far too much of that fuzziness/haziness/glowingness-effect which infested bits of Ratatouille; when it's absent it doesn't improve the acting but does at least let the animation look a little closer to the on-a-par-with-ILM expected-standard-crispiness. It's probably still worth seeing in a cinema and probably still actually good but the point is that it should have been vastly better. None of the other characters really added anything. There were very few whoo-moments. Ben Burtt described it as "R2-D2 the movie" in an early interview but an entire film of R2 would be a little trying; he was only a sidekick and one half of the comic relief/rude mechanicals and only had a few lines.

At least as it was mostly dialogue-free the burbling and shrieking and chair-banging of the children in the auditorium didn't affect the appreciation of the film too much. I've often felt almost-moved to leave and fetch a staff when someone's being particularly irritating but didn't bother for this sort of film though an attendant popped in at one point to tell the seat-banging wandering-around child to shut up; had she heard from outside, did she just pop in to check or do they have some sort of video-monitoring system installed?