DVD Picks & Passes 11.16.2008

Wall-E (2008)

Shaun the Sheep

— Off the Baa (2007)

This week, here it is: the latest masterpiece from the mad geniuses at Pixar; a family film like no other and one of the year’s best films, period.

Part silent comedy-romance, part awestruck sci-fi fable, part Swiftian satire of mass-media consumerist society, Wall-E is a work of towering ambition that aims for greatness and dares to expect more from its audience, too.

The first 40 minutes are almost a featurette in itself: a poetic, nearly dialogue-free pantomime story set in a vast, uninhabited landscape of unremitting bleakness; it’s a world of urban canyons and towers fashioned of endless cubes of compressed trash. Nothing lives or grows here; nothing moves, except for a single lonely robot and the cockroach that is his only companion.

Out of nowhere, this interminable yet narrow world is ripped apart by a thunderous herald of a larger reality, an immense, gleaming rocket ship bearing a wholly unexpected passenger who changes Wall-E’s existence forever.

In the very different second act, we learn more about the fate of mankind and the history of the Earth’s sad status. 2001-like awe yields to Brazil-like futuristic weirdness as Wall-E encounters a space-age luxury liner that’s all painted lanes and neon colors and all-pervasive consumer-media saturation, with humanity asleep at the switch, but ready to be awakened to the possibility of living deliberately. A must-see.

Also new on DVD, from the creators of Wallace & Gromit, is more delightful family fare: Shaun the Sheep — Off the Baa. Available individually or bundled with Wallace & Gromit’s Three Amazing Adventures (a previous DVD Pick), Off the Baa is a collection of eight stop-motion animated shorts produced for British television.

Nearly as offbeat and quirky, in its own way, as Wall-E, Shaun the Sheep is even more emphatically wordless. In fact, like the “Road Runner” shorts, these episodes are modern animated slapstick silent films, with a goofy creativity that is all Aardman Animations.

W&G fans will remember Shaun from the third amazing adventure, “A Close Shave” (Shaun the sheep, get it? Say “shorn” with an English accent). Here we meet Shaun in a flock on a small English farm with a trio of mischievous pigs, a tolerant farm dog who tries to keep order, a stereotypically nasty housecat, and a dim-witted farmer who speaks only in mumbles.

Shaun’s best adventures include an impromptu game of football (soccer to Yanks) with a head of cabbage and a stealth mission into the farmhouse to retrieve a beloved teddy bear. Others are sillier, like a war with a swarm of computer-animated bees.

I’m a huge fan of watching silent films with children (Buster Keaton’s The General, from last week’s DVD Picks, is an ideal starting place). With Mr. Bean, Wall-E and Shaun the sheep, the joys of silents seem to be enjoying a sort of mini-resurgence in family entertainment. More, please!


CONTENT ADVISORY WALL-E: Mild animated menace. Shaun the Sheep — Off the Baa: Nothing objectionable. Both fine family viewing.

Nature Is the Window

A visit to St. Margaret of Scotland Church near the Great Smoky Mountains in time for its namesake’s feast day on Nov. 16. Father William Murphy built the church in memory of his mother, Margaret.