- WALL-E
This weekend, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as part of their ongoing “CSO at the Movies” series, performed the scores from select Pixar movies. Films made by the venerable animation studio have a distinct musical style, making them ideal fodder for “CSO at the Movies”—previous installments featured music from the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Metropolis. Despite a recent run of awful films, Pixar still holds tremendous currency with moviegoers, no doubt fueled by the studio’s string of megahits in the mid-2000s. In total, Pixar has grossed more than $8 billion in ticket sales worldwide, a truly staggering number that probably doesn’t even touch the dollars made in auxiliary merchandising. Despite being products of a commercial juggernaut, the best Pixar films represent some of the finest mainstream moviemaking of this generation. You can catch my five favorite after the jump.
- WALL-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008) Pixar’s most psychologically probing film, it doesn’t let the cogent and incredibly blunt social commentary diminish the mythological charms of the narrative. WALL-E‘s first half, a mostly wordless love story between two robots, represents some of the most ambitious storytelling of any children’s film, but the second half, which settles into a fairly conventional adventure tale, has tremendous momentum.
