I just watched Away from Her, a movie about an old couple where the wife has Alzheimer’s disease and the husband has to cope with her slipping away from him as she begins to forget things and eventually who he is. It was decent, but not a lot more. The whole time I was just aching for it to be somehow more beautiful, by which I mean I thought about The Place Promised in Our Early Days while I was watching Away from Her and wished Away from Her could be even half as beautiful as the representation of separation in that film.

Admittedly, The Place Promised in Our Early Days does have the advantage of being about young people, immediately making it easier for me to relate to its characters. But then relationships, as anyone who has ever read any of my work, are something I’m very much interested in fiction, and the sort of degeneration of the wife in Away from Her is something of which I have comparable first-hand experience.

To the film’s credit, as far as I know, it did represent the effects of Alzheimer’s accurately. Unfortunately, while it got that down, the characterisation of the supporting cast particularly was a little off, with an over-bearing bureaucratic managing nurse type seeming particularly two-dimensional and cliche. The dialogue too often felt a little off, unnaturalistic, as if the writer wanted certain lines to be in the script because they sounded good, regardless of whether they fitted.

Now this is something I imagine, at least from my own experience, all writers do: They think of a really great line or a short exchange and go “yeah, I’ve got to write that into something.” And with more amateur writers you can tell when they’ve done that, while with the really good writers, they still do that, but their lines blend in so well you don’t spot that they were just trying to get to that one line all along. I’m trying to think examples of this, but all I can think of right now is Quentin Tarantino. He, I suspect, does this for every line; he just sits there thinking up great lines and jamming them all together, like “Like a Virgin is about a fuck machine” followed by ten minutes of snappy dialogue about why that’s the case. Of course, making films that are just the ‘great lines’ you thought of doesn’t leave a great deal of room for plot.

Not that I’m talking about Tarantino; I’m talking about Away from Her. I had a couple of problems with one of the main secondary characters, the kind of nurse who worked as a nurse, rather than the manager one. She’s all nice and friendly to the husband for most of the film, but in one scene she suddenly turns on him, and I suppose it’s to reveal some extra back-story and a hitherto unseen aspect of her character, but really it just came across as jarring. The other problem I had with her was that she seemed to have an awful lot of free time to just sit and chat with the husband when, as far as I noticed, there were only about two other staff working the whole care home. Now, I don’t know what healthcare is like in Canada (Michael Moore says it’s good, but I think he’s biased), but my mother’s a matron in an English nursing home and she’s lucky if she gets five minutes for lunch, let alone sitting and chatting with the visitors.

And apart from that, there were a few other contrivances in the film, like at one point the husband asks the manager woman for the home address of another visitor and she just gives it to him. I’m no expert on the policies of Canadian nursing homes, but I’m pretty sure that it’s bad practice to hand out the address of patient’s or their relatives willy-nilly.

I could forgive the film these small inconsistencies; I graciously forgave Makoto Shinkai for his wilder flights of fancy in Place and Voices (admittedly after a short burst of characteristically pedantic ranting), but there still seems to be something lacking. Another, even more comparable, story I wanted Away from Her to ascend to was the plot line that runs through Once Upon a Time in America, wherein the main character, Noodles, knows this girl his whole life, fancies her since she’s a kid, always loves her, even through the violence and the drugs and the other women, and she always kind of loves him, even after he takes her on their one date before she flies to New York or Hollywood to become a star and he rapes her in the car on the way home; but they can never be together because she says that she knows if she was with him he would lock her up in cage when she wanted to be free, and he said he would (not literally, obviously). Now that’s not even the main plotline in Once Upon a Time in America, yet it still held far more resonance with me than Away from Her.

Now, before I end this opinion, two more items: First, old people in films: they always look so idealised and unrealistic. Real old people, especially in nursing homes, aren’t all bright and cheery and running around on zimmer-frames spouting poignant life-affirming advice to anyone who wanders in with a problem: most of the time they just sleep and dribble a bit, or stare blankly at walls. This always strikes me in films and TV shows as particularly artificial, but then, thinking about it, almost everyone is idealised on screen, what with all the make-up. Real people don’t look like TV-people.

The other minor issue I had with Away from Her was too much old people sex. Admittedly it only showed the afterwards, but you still new what they had done, and that’s just wrong: no one over the age of forty has sex, despite what the internet says.

Superficially, not only was the detail in each of the characters impress me (the rusted paint and tarnished metal of Wall-e himself being a particularly nice touch, reminiscent of the beat-up X-wings in the original Star Wars movies) but the cinematography was brilliant too. One of the most important aspects of this that I noticed was the blurring of distant objects, as if the camera was focused on the foreground. Of course, in CGI films, there is no camera, and the depth of field is potentially infinite, meaning that the makers deliberately added this in. And rightly so; it really helps the suspension of disbelief, that everything in the film existed and was filmed. The effect also helped to highlight the important objects on the screen, effective when focusing on the movements of the characters. I know this isn’t the first film to use such an effect, but for some reason it did really stand out in this particular one.

Speaking of the characters, they are, without exception, well-made and likeable. Often in these films, there’s a loud, annoying comic-relief character (Shrek‘s Donkey comes to mind), but Wall-e abstains from such cliche and instead focuses on two primarily silent protagonists. Though their silence could have hindered the presentation of their personality, the animated movements of Wall-e’s two camera-eyes (the only components of his face) convey a surprisingly eloquent range of emotions. The effect of these movements can really be seen in a very late scene in the film where Wall-e has apparently lost his memory. All of a sudden he is transformed into a very lifeless, static-faced robot, and, although aesthetically he does not change at all, I’m certain that even the smallest child in the audience could tell that some spark of personality was lost in the machine.

E.V.E too, while less animated than the more mechanical Wall-e, is easy to read thanks to her more advanced voice synthesiser (though she still says little more than “wall-e” throughout the film, her tone of voice switches convincingly between concerned and chiding, urgent and angry) and her pixel-art eye-display.

Almost my favourite character, however, was, strangely enough, Wall-e’s little cockroach friend. Although he was just a cockroach, drawn and animated stylistically, but without any anthropomorphic features, he had a lot of personality depicted entirely through the way he scurried about and perked up his antennae. And there were several moments throughout the film where you really find yourself caring for the little creature because he occasionally get stepped/rolled on, and you’re almost certain he’s going to be smooshed, but then he just pops back up again and it’s fine. If you want a point of reference for how amazing the effect of this guy is, has anyone ever seen Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof? In that there’s a car scene where the film’s villain is trying to ram the protagonists’ car off the road, with one of the protagonists strapped to be bonnet. Eventually he succeeds, and the protagonist, this young woman, gets hurled off and disappears. Her friends get out the car, and look down at the ground, assuming, as the viewer does, that the woman is dead. Then, all of a sudden, the woman jumps up in the field she landed in and shouts “I’m okay,” then disappears back into the field. It’s a brilliant moment in its surprise funnyness, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying as seeing that little cockroach jump back up, and she had the advantage of being human and integral to the plot.

For a kids’ film, having easy-to-understand characters that children can identify with is, of course, essential, and in creating these, Pixar have been successful. Their success with this film extends further, however, for, while the character development does not extend far beyond the standard in children’s film (ie. The characters start out lonely and eventually learn the importance of friendship), the ideas and messages within the film do.

For example, one of the primary morals of the story is a warning against the over-reliance of humans on technology. We are shown in the second-half of the film a society of overweight humans who have lived on a spaceship for seven-hundred years, all relying on floating chairs for movement, screens permanently before their eyes for entertainment, and robots for everything else. Although hardly an Orwellian dystopia, this brightly coloured society presents a somewhat shocking satire and projection of our own culture’s future. Not only do we see corporations dictating what people should eat and wear, and mankind forced into space by the mess they created on Earth, but we are also shown the dangers of letting technology take over our lives and blind us to the world around us.

Now this last idea, was an important theme in a science-fiction novel I read some time ago: Roger MacBride Allen’s Isaac Asimov’s Caliban. In the novel people had all forgotten how to do anything for themselves because they had robots to do it all, and this had, from time to time, led to people dying, just from sheer lack of doing anything. Now I’m just using this book as an example because it’s one I’ve read, but I’m sure there’s hundreds of others, primarily in the sci-fi genre that warn against the same. And there’s films too, like the Matrix for example, which depict machines as detrimental or dangerous to mankind, but none of these are as accessible as Wall-e, especially for children.

This simple presentation of complex and relevant ideas makes Wall-e not only a great kids’ film, but also a great family film: one more akin to the all-ages appeal of Studio Ghibli offerings than the child demographic of, say, Pokemon the Movie (I can see now why my Dad fell asleep in the cinema during that particular cash-in).