We just got back from watching the friends and family preview of WALL·E, at Pixar, and after having seen Kung Fu Panda less than a week ago, my standards for animation movies were set pretty high. The story line of Kung Fu Panda was great, kept you laughing all the time - specially when you are sitting by someone who's real name is Panda and whom resembles the character greatly!
Studying at Brown and being surrounded and taught by graphics gurus such as Spike, Andy van Dam or Travis Fischer, you develop a better eye for graphics than the average person, and sorry to say it, but Kung Fu Panda was lacking in that deparment. Graphics were sometimes coarse, like lights and fireworks, and things like the hair in the characters was nowhere as impressive as the renderings you could find in already pretty old movies by Pixar, such as Monsters Inc.
People who had seen both of them thought Kung Fu Panda was a much better movie, where "better" is clearly a hard thing to define, and that made me a bit hesitant about WALL·E. After the high-security screening we had to go through to get in, including metal detectors to avoid cell phones into the movie theater we dove straight into WALL·E.
Although you can check plot reviews somewhere else, I will mention that the first half hour of the movie was pretty void of words, and despite that it was full of meaning and expression, mainly brought out through great imagery and beautiful music. I am sure this will surprise everyone, although it is so flawless that for many it will go unnoticed.
Not only was the story behind WALL·E pretty good, winding down a bit towards the end, but the graphics were excellent. Some things to look out for are the subsurface scattering, greatly present in Eve, influenced by Jonny Ive to look a lot like the old iBooks (you need to watch the movie to see them in their full glory); the particle systems were also really amazing. You can see a good collection of these and more candy for a graphics junkies in the following video:
If you have free time this summer, or any time soon, you should go watch this gem of a film, and if you don't, well, maybe you should revisit your priorities list. Knowing, or learning a bit about graphics before watching the film, will also allow you to a) make intelligent comments about the graphics on this film, and how they are far superior to those in Kung Fu Panda, and b) really be touched by the profoundness and beauty not only of the story, how well emotions are conveyed with few words, but also by the technical beauty and difficulty behind the image generation.
After the film we got a tour of Pixar. It is a modern industrial-looking building, but still warm and with creativity oozing out the walls. It reminded me a lot of Google, specially their NYC office(scooters included!), which as of last summer had a whole city block worth of floor, on the 4th floor of what used to be the very industrial Port Authority building. It is surprising how different a place it is from Apple's headquarters, even though they pretty much came from the same man. I guess his vision of workplace experience changed a bit in the last twenty five or so years. Hopefully Apple employees will one day work in a place as inspiring as Pixar's campus.
All of this was thanks to Travis.
