My 2001: A Space Odyssey, at four years old

And it only took a moment to be loved a whole life long.

Vividly do I remember seeing WALL-E in cinemas, in 3D, the week it came out with my dad and brother when I was four years old, and still do I remember it being the first time I ever watched a movie or went to the movies and had what you would call a true “cinematic experience” where I was so transfixed with everything and all of what I was seeing play out before my eyes on the screen. Compared to everything I had ever seen in my life at that point, this is was something else entire, especially in the fact too that when I was a toddler, I couldn’t sit still AT ALL in the cinemas. That alone should confirm the power this film has when it was able to keep my butt down on that seat and hypnotized the whole way through. This was my 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years before I would actually sit down and see it. Of all of Pixar’s films, WALL-E is the most cinematic and artsy simply because it is the most visual. Or rather, for a good long chunk of its runtime, it relies on visual language rather than dialogue in the way a silent film would to get it’s story moving.

When you look back on Pixar’s filmography prior to WALL-E, you’ll notice that they never exactly tackled and treated mutual love and romance as a key theme to both the story and it’s ideas, and this is the first time the studio had ever explicitly made what you could to an extent call a romance, and one could also make the case that Up, which released a year later, is almost somewhat of an answer to WALL-E’s love story, a love story which I have always believed is one of the most moving and perfectly executed of them all, even if it is between two robots and not two humans.

It’s certainly the most bold, deep and existential of all of Pixar’s films. Even as a kid it made me ask questions to myself to concepts that at the time I didn’t fully grasp or understand but questions that nevertheless have continued to stick with me over the years. Although Ratatouille is easily my favourite of all of Pixar’s films, WALL-E is the one I can’t help but think about the most, and I think a great deal of that very much has to do with that personal sentiment I have of how profound it was to me in seeing it at the cinemas when I was four when the world and my surroundings were still all so new to me. That’s a memory I’ll always carry with me, just as this film will always stick with me too.