The Really Drawn-out Blog Cabins Decennial Spectacular: #7

Decennial, in case you're not hip to the term, means 1. relating to or lasting for ten years, or 2. occurring every ten years. It's really a word that we should hear more often. Anyway, this will be my series where I count down my favorites from the last decade, and since I don't plan on it taking 10 years to finish, we're going to go with the second definition.

Previous day's posts:
12/21: Intro/#10: Idiocracy
12/22: #9: Children of Men
12/23: #8: Pan's Labyrinth

Number 7 on the RD-oBCDS is...

Wall*E (2008)
Pixar released seven feature films during the last decade. Six received a Best Animated Feature nomination from the Academy (this number will reach seven in a few short months when Up joins the team), four of which went on to win (Cars and Monsters, Inc. being the exception; again, this number is likely to climb to five). All but Cars has a Rotten Tomatoes score of > 95%. All but Cars has a worldwide gross of >$500 million. And all this is a long way of saying that any number of them could (should?) be in this spot, specifically either Finding Nemo or The Incredibles.

So what puts Wall*E ahead of them?

Good question. It comes down to a few things it was able to do: a) make you fall in love with a robot, b) leave you even more speechless than the film with a wordless 20-minute intro, and c) incorporate a preachy message...without being overtly preachy (the link to Idiocracy doesn't hurt, either). In addition, by being the newest of the three - and by being the only one set outside of our atmosphere - it's able to capture your eyes just as much as it did your heart.

(But it's really close. I feel like no matter which was chosen, it would have been the "wrong" selection.)