While I was not expecting a movie so artful and so full of meaning, I did fully expect to enjoy another Disney-Pixar venture and indeed I did. Did I say “enjoy?” I meant “love!”
I loved everything. Wall-E is a love story not necessarily aimed at kids and rivals any live action movie you’ll see this year. I didn’t think I could be more “wowed” than I was after seeing Finding Nemo or Ratatoullie, but I stand corrected. All Disney-Pixar movies to date tended toward the cartoonish, but this movie was not cartoony at all. It was art. I think I could watch the movie again and focus simply on the incredible attention to detail shown in every aspect of future Earth.
Oh, yes. The movie plops us down on Earth’s barren landscape 700 years in the future and Wall-E is a tiny robotic trash compactor who’s sole purpose is to pick up trash, compact it into a cube, and stack it. Over and over again, day after day, cleaning up a decimated planet that humans left behind (are you picking up on the social commentary that everyone is buzzing about?). Like all future robots, Wall-E is intelligent and is ever fascinated by certain aspects of old Earth and collects them and saves them in his own private collection. Wall-E is a “survivor” and has outlasted hundreds of other Wall-E units we see broken down around trashed Earth. He never abandons his primary protocol of gathering and organizing trash, but Wall-E has created a secondary agenda for himself: surviving and enjoying old human pop-culture. His world turns upside down when E.V.E. lands on Earth and her protocol is to find “life” so that humans can return to Earth once it has become life sustaining again. A classic tale of boy-robot meets girl-robot, girl-robot tries to vaporize boy-robot, girl-robot loves boy-robot, girl-robot and boy-robot make political and social commentary, boy-robot loses girl-robot, and a big fat guy saves the day.
Remember when sci-fi movies used to portray future humans as highly intelligent, completely enlightened (usually with big heads to carry their huge brains around), and representative of the best of mankind surviving? Well, current sci-fi trends show a different future where the stupidest of our species make it out alive. This idea was first brought forward by Mike Judge’s Idiocracy and the theme is altered only slightly in Wall-E. Instead of Idiocracy’s version of the future where we Americans/Earthlings are all half-wits, Wall-E’s future human race have lost all muscle and bone mass and hover around all day watching a TV and talking on a blue tooth mobile phone. I shudder when I think that could be completely true, but I totally want a hover chair with a TV and a mobile phone.
The only knock against Wall-E might be its child unfriendliness – and maybe I should have read more about it before going. If you take your kids and they enjoy other Pixar standards such as Cars, Toy Story, etc …expect many questions in this one. What did he say? Why is he collecting things? Where is he? Who’s that? What are those people doing? And just try explaining the theory of evolution, environmentalism, and artificial intelligence to a 5 year old while whispering in a dark movie theater. Not to mention explaining how humans have survived for nearly 700 years in a single space station without overpopulation dooming them and why their English language remains unchanged and avoided the addition of new dialects, jargon, and words, a common evolution of language?
