2009 Hugo Nominees - Best Graphic Story

First, here's another nominee for best professional artist, Donato Giancola:

The nominees for the new best graphic story category are interesting since they can be easily broken into three blocks of two books. We have two licensed comics based on already popular SF properties, two climaxes to long running Vertigo series, and two webcomics. I don't usually read licensed comics since they usually disappoint so those were the two I had not read before. The two webcomic nominees are one third of all the webcomics I follow and of the remaining webcomics there's only one that might even be considdered for the award. So I'm going to break it down by those blocks.

The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle; written by Jim Butcher; art by Ardian Syaf - Though I'm aware of Butcher's novel series about a hard boiled wizard detective in modern Chicago I haven't read any of them. The books have been recommended to me a few times but I'm always hesitant to pick up any book that's described as part of a "series". After reading this comic series I think I will try one of the novels. This comic had the advantage of being written by Butcher and unlike some writers from other mediums Butcher used the comic format well; his dialog is tight and complements the images. In this story the wizard/detective is called in to consult on a murder at a zoo that is being blamed on a gorrilla. Naturally there's evil magic involved and the detective gets in over his head. I don't want to discount Syaf's contribution to this work; most memorably he drew the title character in an overshadowed hard-boiled rough style while his unwilling sidekick is much lighter. The whole thing made for a charming book that made me smile.

Serenity: Better Days; written by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews; art by Will Conrad; color by Michelle Madsen; cover by Jo Chen - In contrast with the previous book this is exactly why I don't read licensed comic books. While all of the common beats from the Firefly television series are here this comic is like a faded photocopy. The scruffy rogue characters are there but they're a bit off. It's a plot that you might see in the show (the crew makes a large pile of money while they're being hunted by someone looking for veterans of the war) but it doesn't come across well. There are moments that are effective and they are fleeting. The main storyline is disjointed and jumps from big moment to big moment. Given how the dialog just falls flat I strongly suspect that Whedon's involvement with this comic was just to say "Hey, let's make a Firefly comic!" and putting his name on it to increase sales. Conrad's art isn't bad but is nowhere near smooth enough to make up for that story.

Y: The Last Man, Volume 10: Whys and Wherefores; written by Brian K. Vaughan; pencilled by Pia Guerra; inked by Jose Marzan, Jr. - I never thought I would enjoy a series about all the male mammels on earth dying except one man and his monkey. Instead of taking the obvious route Vaughan turned it into a journey into a post-apocalyptic world as the last man wandered the face of the earth looking for the girlfriend he was about to propose to over the phone when the deaths struck. In this last volume he finally catches up with her after years of wandering and has to decide what he really wants. Simultaniously his enemies are catching up with him for one last confrontation. That storyline is incredibly effective as Vaughn and Guerra capture the growth that all the characters have undergone. The final issue is a bit more controversial since it jumps forward several decades and is filled with a lot of clumsy dialog telling the readers what happened to everyone. On the other hand the conclusion of that final issue is absolutely perfect. Still this is a very good story that only suffers because the reader needs to have read the rest of the series to appreciate it.

Fables: War and Pieces; written by Bill Willingham; pencilled by Mark Buckingham; art by Steve Leialoha and Andrew Pepoy; color by Lee Loughridge; letters by Todd Klein - I'm a bit confused on this nominee: there's a three issue storyline titled "War and Pieces" that's part of the Fables series and there's a six issue trade paperback War and Pieces. Given the context of the nominees I believe that they mean the trade paperback but I can't be certain. The series itself is about all stories being true (especially fairy tales) on other planes of existence. Before the series began one of the characters, known only as the Adversary now, has conquored all of the other worlds forcing the characters in those fairy tales to flee to the real world. In this volume those refugees take the lessons of the real world back to make war on the Adversary. So there is a spy story as one gathers vital information which is followed by the story of the very brief and very brutal war. This volume does have the advantage of standing well on its own though again as the climax of a seventy-five issue long storyline it's more effective if the reader doesn't start at the end. Willingham clearly planned out the war carefully which makes the plan something simple and direct that the reader can both understand and believe. Buckingham always does a great job and for the final issue in the storyline does everything in spectacular verticle layouts.

Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones; written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright - The premise of this webcomic is a psuedo-Victorian world where some people possess the ability to create steampunk inventions that break the laws of physics. Agatha Heterodyne is the heir to the greatest family of mad scientists and has been in hiding her whole life from the forces that tore her family apart. In this section of the story she has returned to her ancestral home, an intelligent castle that has gone insane in her absense. People who want to seize that power for themselves or destroy it before it can be used have also arrived and Agatha must attempt to gain control over the castle before their plans can be activated. I've enjoyed the Foglio's work since I saw it in Dragon magazine and the webcomic is up to their standards. Unfortunately this particular storyline feels more like a bridge between larger events than a contained story of its own. We have a lot of characters moving to get into position to react but very little of them actually taking action.

Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic; by Howard Tayler - In contrast this storyline is almost completely self-contained. The mercenary crew that stars in this strip sold one of their enemies to some revolutionaries in a desperate situation as a "military aide". That enemy managed to win the revolution and install himself as king of the planet though his reign is measured in hours. Now the mercenaries find themselves in a classic dilema: they have two people who hire them to steal the body and the government of the planet hires them to guard the body. The dilema, of course, is how can they get paid three times for the same work. Tayler's art isn't up to the quality of the other nominees (he's grown from a doodler in his first few strips to a decent cartoonist over the ten years he's been working on the strip); still the actual story is among the best thanks to it's snappy pacing as a daily comic strip. Tayler keeps things moving from gag to gag and also recognizing that any given strip could be someone's first and that makes it very accessable.

My ballot for Best Graphic Story would be:

The Dresden Files
Schlock Mercenary
Fables
Y: The Last Man
Girl Genius
No Award
Serenity

2009 Hugo Nominees - The Novelettes

Before going on to the novelettes I wanted to include the Hugo nominated professional artists in my look at the nominees. As I did when I went through the past winners I won't review the art; I don't have an eye for it. All of the pictures were created in 2008 since that is the period that they're nominated for. Finally all of the images are taken from the artists' own websites so you'll notice their watermarks on most of the images. Since I'm behind by one nominee there's two paintings today. First, from Dan Dos Santos:


And from Bob Eggleton:


If the theme of the short story category was "monkeys" the theme here is "old horror pastiche". As before the links will take you to the text of the story. This is also the first time in looking at nominees where I didn't actively dislike any of the nominees in the category. A couple of the stories approach the borderline and none cross it.

“Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel - I've already reviewed this story as the 2008 Nebula winner. For those who d0n't want to look back: I enjoyed it as a cute mash-up of Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice. I can't call it brilliant work though if you like that kind of literary game then you'll enjoy it.

“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner - The first thing that any reader is going to notice about this novelette is the quirky voice. It's all short, declaritive sentences with almost no description. Once you get into the story about a boy who finds a ray-gun and learns about love and responsibility from that voice helps keep things from being too personal. Gardner takes the story in a few directions I didn't expect right up to the ending which has its own strange twist. One thing I appreciated was just how naturally the story progresses; it might have a ray-gun as the driving factor but all of the reactions are reasonable. Gardner does a wonderful job in capturing the changing attitudes of the boy as he matures and that carries the story well.

“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi - In the newsroom of the near future a Laotian reporter concentrates on important stories that don't attract interest. He is threatened with being fired if he cannot get more readers and one of his coworkers helps him hook up with a starlet that can raise his profile. The newsroom of tomorrow is an interesting theme to work with and I felt that Bacigalupi just didn't quite get the concepts down. Reading the story it felt like he knew the buzzwords and problems facing media organizations but not how everything connects together. Consequently he has a news cycle and reactions that are measured in seconds; the media is certainly going to be cycling faster in the future but there is a limit of human response. Getting beyond that it becomes just another story of a crusading journalist versus the people who just want fluff. Personally I would have rather read the story about the people working to fill those incredibly fast news cycles.

“Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear - I was expecting more of a Lovecraft pastiche from this story than what it is. Instead Bear's story feels more like a response to Lovecraft's attitudes regarding race (those attitudes were solidly planted in the mid-nineteenth century despite the fact that Lovecraft wrote in the early-twentieth). In "Shoggoths in Bloom" the threat of a second world war is in the air as an African-American college professor attempts the first significant examination of the shoggoths in the wild. The giant, acidic, tentacle-sprouting monstrocities ooze onto shore in the late autumn where they flower for a brief time before returning to the ocean depths. While examining them the professor deals with the casual racism of New England, his own automatic responses to innocent remarks, and concerns for what is happening in Nazi Germany. The first two thirds of the story are interesting but the last portion where all of the answers are handed over on a deus ex machina left a bitter taste in my mouth. The ethical delema that replaced the questions wasn't interesting enough to make up for the shift.

“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick - Resnick has done it to me again; he wrote a story where I'm not sure what to make of the ending. If the man wrote endings that were any more ambiguous they'd trail off into random text. This time around two very old men reminisce about a a magic shop where they first met as children nearly eighty years before. On a lark the two of them look for the shop and find it with the same proprietor who introduced them still running it. The proprietor now agrees to show them some new things. Unfortunately for this story the ending comes down to a confrontation between some weak homilies and vaguely sinister supernatural forces. That made it much less involving for me than some of Resnick's other stories. Still it's a solid piece of work despite the fact that strange shops of wonders and reclaimed youth have been overused.

My ballot for the novelette category would look like:

“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner
“Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel
“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick
“Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi
No Award

Review - "Last Summer at Mars Hill", "Solitude", and "Death and the Librarian"

"Last Summer at Mars Hill"
by Elizabeth Hand
1995 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

There's a psychic colony in Maine where would be psychics go and spend a summer along the coast. Two of them bring their children along with them and these two are a woman dying of advanced breast cancer and a gay man dying of AIDS. Most people go for a good time but a few people who go can see beings of flickering light who appear briefly and vanish.

I can say some nice things about Hand's story. It's reasonably well plotted, the characters avoid the obvious cliches even when they touch on them, and she understands how to pace her central mystery. For some reason that I can't put my finger on her prose bored me. It wasn't anything that I could point to and say, "That's the problem!"; no long descriptive passages, no clunky grammar, no tin earred dialog. It's just that reading this story made my eyes glaze over. I am prepared to say that my inability to get into this story is completely my own problem.

Perhaps part of the issue I had was the viewpoint. The story is told mainly from the perspective of the children one of whom is angry with her dying mother and the other is accepting of his dying father. That's almost the entire sum of their characterization. I couldn't connect with them at all and the impact of that may have been masked by the rapidly shifting viewpoints.

The plot does move in a predictable fashion though in this case I think it's more fair to call it inevitable. The peices are all there and obvious to anyone who has read a bit of SF and the story is more about the characters dealing with death.

Despite my own problems with reading "Last Summer at Mars Hill" I can't say it was a bad story. It someone was looking for a bit of light modern fantasy then they might enjoy it.

"Solitude"
by Ursula K. Le Guin
1995 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

I've got some mixed feelings about "Solitude". On one hand it's a perfect example of why Le Guin is considered to be a good writer. On the other I suspect this is an attempt to lull me into a false sense of security and the next Le Guin story I read is going to be so terrible that it makes my eyes bleed.

In "Solitude" an anthropologist wants to study a lost colony of humanity that has developed a culture of isolation. As an adult this anthropologist cannot get anyone from the colony to communicate with her but she has a clever plan. She brings her two children along since any culture must pass on its values to children.

Le Guin draws on personal experience for this story since her parents were anthropologists who took her along into the field. I'm not sure how much of the story is drawn from her life but the whole thing feels very natural. In general I've found that when Le Guin sticks to anthropology she does a much better job of telling stories and that's the case here.

The real core of the story is a mother and daughter growing apart as the daughter is absorbed into another culture (I'm not spoiling anything there since it's clear what has happened from the start). This conflict is exceptionally well handled with the mother being unable to handle the social isolation and her daughter being grown into it. These are some characters who will inevitably hurt each other and the collision is fascinating to read about.

One problem with the story is that several plot points depend on the reader being familiar with the settings of her Hainish stories. Especially how they lack faster than light travel but have faster than light communications though there are other aspects where it helps to know the setting. As a result I could not recommend this as a story for someone completely new to Le Guin despite the fact that it touches on several of her major reoccurring themes. If you've read The Left Hand of Darkness or other books in the setting then this is a prime example of Le Guin doing what she does best.

"Death and the Librarian"
by Esther M. Friesner
1995 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

Wrapping up the common themes of the week this is a story about a dying woman having a final conversation with the personification of death. Friesner doesn't really explore new ground with this theme though she does use it well.

The librarian in this case is a woman who made a few troubling choices (I can't really call them bad) early on in life and has spent decades trapped by them. Death this time is a constantly shifting form who wants to politely whisk people off to their final reward with as little fuss as possible.

The story is a slight bit of fluff; a tiny thing where not a lot happens beyond the librarian explaining her life to death and a revelation toward the end. As characters go they're okay but not really memorable. With such a common plot I needed something more special to make it stand out for me and for that reason I can't recommend hunting it down. Though if you find it someday as you're reading an anthology then you won't be disappointed if you read it.

2009 Hugo Nominees - The Short Stories

Last year I only discussed the three short fiction categories for the Hugo nominations. I'm going to expand things a little bit more this time around. I'm not going for all of the nominated novels or related non-fiction. I'm also not planning on the short form dramatic presentation category since I'm intentionally behind on two of the shows nominated (maybe as the summer progresses and I catch myself up on Lost and Battlestar Galactica). I have however read four of the six nominees in the graphic story category and have easy access to the remaining two. So I'm going to cover all of the short fiction nominees, the long form dramatic presentation, and graphic story categories.

First up are the short stories which demonstrate to us that if your story starts with any letter greater than "F" people just won't reach it when they're reading for nominees. All of the links will take you to a copy of the story. Here they are in the order which I read them:

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson - This story is from that school of urban fantasy where something strange happens to give someone's life meaning. In this case it's a set of strange monkeys who perform an impossible disappearing trick. Their owner purchased the act for one dollar from the previous owner when her life was at its lowest point. There are two things that make this story more effective than most along these lines. First the style that it's written in is a disjointed set of notes that carries quite a bit of information. Also the reader gets some answers that add a touch of charm to its conclusion. I enjoyed the story quite a bit.

“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang - This might be my least favorite Chiang story which puts it on the level of good but not spectacular. In it there is a strange world filled with compressed gas driven automatons. One of them recognizes that something is changing within themselves or the world and undertakes extreme measures to understand. Once he does he finds that the nature of the universe is far more cruel than he could imagine. There's some direct global warming parallels in the story but this is not a story about environmentalism beyond the biggest of the big picture. Instead Chiang focuses on how understanding a small thing can change the fundamental understanding of the universe. The problem with this is that it means that the reader gets a lot of exposition. And when I say a lot I mean metric tonnes of it. The concepts raised are intriguing and the narrator's voice carries it well enough but this is not a very tight story and that's due to the quantity of data that has be thrown at the reader.


“Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal - This is an astoundingly short story; I haven't done a word count on it but I'd be surprised if it exceded a thousand. Still it's not imposssible for a good story to be told in that space; unfortunately "Evil Robot Monkey" isn't a very good story. There's a smart monkey who scults clay and swears at children who make fun him. That's almost the entire story right there. It comes across as one-tenth of a story rather than something complete. Characters exist only as the broadest outlines and plot is non-existant. There's not even an interesting prose style to give it some strength.

“Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick - For this short story a cleaning robot at a church is inadvertantly converted to Christianity by the reverand. For the first half of the story I thought that Resnick was going someplace interesting with the difference between faith and knowledge. I suppose I should say that I was surprised by the second half but the surprise was that anyone would write a story where robots were standing in as objects of human prejudices today. Those stories were stale in the 1950's when they were socially relevant; today it's just clumsy. Despite being a decent storyteller Resnick can't do much with such a worn out story. I found the initial philisophical questions raised much more interesting than the flat characters and when they vanished for a quick lesson that "Prejudice is bad" they couldn't carry it.

“From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick - Swanwick's story also uses an ancient SF theme: two seperate aliens that cannot trust each other are forced together by circumstances to join together in order to cross dangerous territory. In this case it's a human from a libertarian distopia joining with an alien from a society that holds trust as the highest virtue. Together they're on the run from the destruction of the alien's city which was betrayed and they carry with them a library containing information beyond calculable value. What makes this story work is the ambiguousness of it; while both character's hold their society's values in great esteem they also recognize the limitations of it even before the story begins. So while it plays with the "learning about other cultures" theme there is an undercurrent that both already know those lessons. It also helps that the story has a unique viewpoint: a ghost AI that runs one a spacesuit. It's a subtle story that has some interesting layers and I appreciated it for that.

So my ballot would be:

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”
“From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled”
“Exhalation”
No award
“Article of Faith”
“Evil Robot Monkey”

Hey, a Convenient Sale!

I really enjoyed Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller which won the 2006 Hugo award for best related non-fiction. It was both an entertaining writer's guide and history of her time teaching at the Clarion writer's workshop.

Small Beer Press, the publisher of Storyteller is currently selling copies of it for just one dollar to clear out their warehouse. It's a great bargain and they have several other chapbooks and anthologies similarly discounted. You can't beat that price for such a great book so I'd recommend grabbing it while they still have some.

Review - "The Night We Buried Road Dog", "Graves", and "A Defense of the Social Contracts"

There's one oddity that's worth noting before I get started. The 1994 Nebulas were the last time that the Hugos and Nebulas for short fiction shared two or more awards. In addition it would take until the 2001 Nebulas for the two awards to agree on any story. At the same time in the novel category there was a ten year long disagreement. So after here it is territory where the SFWA and SF fandom didn't agree.

1993 was a year for light fantasy; both of the unique winners that year could have easily dropped the fantastic element in the tale and still had most of the same concepts...

"The Night We Buried Road Dog"
by Jack Cady
1993 Nebula Award for Best Novella

On the lonesome Montana plains during the early 1960's lived eccentric men who swear by their automobiles and pass rumors between them about a legendary wanderer who is only known by the name "Road Dog". One of these men starts an auto graveyard for burying beloved cars. When another has a strange face to face encounter with the Road Dog he flees the region but finds himself being drawn back for a confrontantion.

The plot itself in this story isn't much but Cady does a great job with character and mood. Instead of just being a collection of quirks Cady doesn't forget that they need to be interesting characters first. So while one of them may love cars so much he sets up memorials to them that isn't the only thing there is to him.

As for mood a big part of that is how well Cady establishes his own kind of Americana folklore. The souls of those who died at the roadside appear just off the headlights to distract weary drivers. Ghost cars roam the lonely highways late at night appearing from nowhere and vanishing in the distance. The mysterious Road Dog communicates through obscure messages left on rest stop toilet stall walls. The story borrows liberally from urban legends and uses them to good effect.

For a story about fast cars this is a very leasurely story. I think that works for its purpose, though. It's about men leading a lonely existance in the wilds of Montana where time passes slowly. Cady was so evocative in "The Night We Buried Road Dog" that I think it easily overcomes the less interesting plot. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

"Graves"
by Joe Haldeman
1993 Nebula Award for Best Short Story
Tied for 1993 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Short Fiction

During the Viet Nam was there was a soldier assigned to body recovery and identification. An officer too flush with his own power demands that he go into the field to a firebase for immediate removal of corpse. Once there the soldier finds two bodies, an American and a strange looking tribesman and before he can investigate further he becomes caught in a firefight.

I know that he's just drawing on his experiences but Joe Haldeman captures the feeling of the military better than any SF writer out there. "Graves" puts that on full display and though it uses a lot of familiar cliches Haldeman can tell those and make them interesting.

This is a very short story and in this case it barely qualifies as fantasy. In fact the fantasy element is so light that I suspect it was applied just to sell the story to a magazine. Still it is well integrated; it doesn't feel like a bolted on monster thanks to the resolution in the last few paragraphs. I have my own theory about the nature of the story and since it would spoil things I won't go into it; I will, however encourage you to read "Graves".

"A Defense of the Social Contracts"
by Martha Soukup
1994 Nebula Award for Best Short Story

In the future civilization has changed so that everyone registers their preferred sexual habits. The idea is so that there could be no deception when, for example, a polyamourous person meets someone looking for a committed relationship. When one woman falls in love with a man registered for in discriminant sex she schemes to force him to be monogamous.

This is classic SF in the "posit a strange thing about a society and explore the consequence" mold. I've got to say a society where sexual behavior is both incredibly open and enforced is an interesting one. The concept includes how the story is told; it is done as a cautionary tale that is remote and passionless. It results in one of those interesting situations where things the problems of our world are replaced with a new set of complications.

I understand what Soukup was doing with the style she chose for this story, I just found that it made it hard to be interested in the characters. I suspect that she wound up doing this because that main character is fairly unpleasant and disconnecting the reader from them would avoid "taking sides" in her argument. Either way the prose wound up being technically interesting but dull to read.

For that reason I cannot just recommend "A Defense of Social Contract". If you're like narratives with unique styles then you may enjoy the story but I think that it will fall flat for most readers.

Review - WALL-E

WALL-E
Story by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, and Pete Docter
2008 Nebula Winner for Best Script

I was going to lead this review off with a bit of snark about how in Hollywood even the hoariest old SF cliches are treated as fresh and exciting. Why Pixar studio's WALL-E, to go straight to the point, uses dozens of them! And then I'd segue into how the script was still very good. Of course then it struck me: the cliches were the point. WALL-E, like Pixar's previous movie The Incredibles, is in part a tribute to the source material and it made me enjoy the film even more.

The earth has become a polluted wasteland and so humanity leaves it behind to travel in luxury among the stars. They leave behind robots to clean up the planet and over the centuries they slowly fail until only one, the titular WALL-E, is left. He continues to dutifully pile up the trash left behind until one day a spaceship lands and a gleaming white robot named EVE emerges. WALL-E falls in love for the first time and sets out to impress EVE as she pursues her own mission.

The Nebula awarded was for "Best Script" and it's hard to dispute that WALL-E is a superior bit of screenwriting. The first half of the film is effectively a silent movie as the main characters barely speak. Exposition is provided in only the broadest strokes through advertisements. While the writers may have avoided dialog in this portion of the film they did not skimp on developing plot or character. If that wasn't enough the conflicts in the first half of the film get resolved and then the second half of the film could almost stand on its own as another movie. That was an ingenious bit of planning as both halves play off each other but possess completely different styles.

One thing that I appreciated in WALL-E was that it was not simply another hypocritical attack on consumer culture while simultaneously attempting to sell things to audiences. While that attack was definitely there I think it was layered by a recognition that people want convenience and comfort. The "evil corporation" in the back story that ran the world seemed to just be too efficient at giving people what they wanted. In this kind of film with an environmental message businesses are typically portrayed as diabolical, all-consuming evils while WALL-E acknowledges a more realistic view of businesses. By not having a "villain" beyond human nature itself WALL-E was a more effective movie.

Getting beyond the writing WALL-E was, as you can expect from a Pixar film, superbly directed and animated. The world in my view appeared to have much more depth than previous animated films that Pixar has done. This is in part due to a greater use of distant shots that help emphasize the isolation. The first portion of the film in particular has a much more natural look than what we've seen from them before. Later on other more obviously cartoonish characters come in and the environment becomes more close and it looks more like previous Pixar efforts and in this case the "plastic" effect of CGI doesn't harm the imagery.

The references to SF aren't just in the writing, by the way; I noticed the use of the patented Battlestar Galactica shaking tracking followed by wavering zoom shot. The whole film really is an homage to great science fiction.

I wish I could compliment the cast as highly as the writing and animation but I'm sorry to say that the actors simply aren't given a lot to do. What they do in this movie they do extremely well; it's just when there's no dialog for half the film then they don't get a chance to show off. It really is the animation that carries the characterization and story in WALL-E. There are only four characters that speak in sentences and only two of them ever interact.

There has only been one Pixar movie that I have not enjoyed completely and it wasn't WALL-E. Even with it's use of many tired old themes WALL-E manages to make them all seem bright and new again. This is a classic example of an animated movie that works on multiple levels and a perfect example of how the people at that studio are making movies that will be remembered for generations.