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January 01, 2009

Best of 2008

The real world did its best to bring us down this year, but the movies are still about those who dream big, as evidenced by my top three picks for 2008: Whether it’s a lovestruck robot willing to wait 700 years for his soulmate, a burned-out wrestler fighting to regain his respect or a silly Frenchman with all-but-suicidal notions of civil disobedience, such characters reminds us nothing is impossible. Of the 236 first-run and festival films I saw last year (here’s the full list), the following are the ones I simply can’t live without:

Top 10 of 2008

1. Wall-E
There are some who refer to “the Pixar formula” as if consistency of quality were a bad thing. The way I see it, Wall-E raises the bar for not just animation but movies in general. From the beginning, the studio rejected singing forest creatures and fairy-tale source material, always looking for new ways to tell stories. This time, director Andrew Stanton creates a staggering photoreal future — a planet overrun with trash — and finds both a love story (Pixar’s first) and hope for humanity in the rubble. The movie’s unassuming lead character, a rusty trash-compacting robot with eyes and arms and no other immediately relatable features, evokes the pure animation magic of Luxo Jr., the expressive lamp featured in the company’s logo. That we invest so much emotion in that little fella merely proves the extent of their talents. When Buzz Lightyear said, “To infinity and beyond,” this is no doubt the kind of constant innovation his creators had in mind.

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Posted by Peter Debruge at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)