WALL-E Pulls Few Punches in Fine Environmental Family Flick
Having seen pretty much every film Pixar has ever produced, and finding their work to be uniformly excellent, I went to check out their latest release, WALL-E, with high expectations - and I'm pleased to say that they were met. Director Andrew Stanton (of Finding Nemo fame) and his team have brought what could easily have been just another sci-fi cartoon throwaway to life in what will probably shortly be considered an instant classic.
First off, there are many erstwhile "environmental" movies aimed at children that are just "greenwashed" tripe and let corporations totally off the hook for their role in the ongoing destruction of the ecosphere. WALL-E goes for the jugular, positing an Earth 700 years in the future that was destroyed by the 22nd century thanks to the one remaining global corporation, Buynlarge (BnL), that also became the global government.
When WALL-E opens, we find the protagonist of the same name - a nearly 700 year old trash-clearing robot - going about his Sisyphean daily grind of compacting small cubes of garbage (most of it with BnL logos on it) and stacking it into skyscraper sized towers among the remains of what was once a large American city. He - for we are encouraged to think of him as male - has clearly been at his gig for a long time.
So long, in fact, that he has become sentient. And a bit eccentric - spending much of his day collecting trinkets - which he later files in neat racks of the former carry-all vehicle that has become his home. The audience is shown hints of what has happened to the Earth as he makes his rounds in the form of BnL video footage encouraging everyone on Earth to escape all the pollution and garbage in space for "just 5 years" while everything was to be cleaned up by robots like WALL-E. Obviously, things didn't quite work out that way.
Replacing his broken parts from the rusting frames of his many long-dysfunctional sibling WALL-Es that are strewn about the ruined landscape, he ventures home with his pet cockroach every night and closes the door just in time to escape the nearly nightly dust storms that scour the landscape.
Then his personality really come out as the audience sees him watch the old Jerry Herman musical, "Hello Dolly!" (upon which the movie is loosely based) over and over again, and pine for the true love he sees reflected on the holo-projector (itself hooked up to an iPod that is, together with the Macintosh-like "DAH" sound WALL-E makes when he charges his solar battery each morning, the only evident product placement in the film). It seems a lonely life for the little robot.
Soon enough, however, viewers are introduced to WALL-E's love interest, a sleek advanced and potentially deadly female robot named EVE (get it?) - a scout for the remnant of humanity that we discover survives on a huge BnL starship called Axiom. One could quibble with Stanton for gender-typing the robots, but I suppose a progressive environmental children's film with gay or, in this case, gender-neutral protagonists will have a to wait a couple more decades to get made by a major studio. One could also read class elements into the love match (WALL-E, worker; EVE; professional), but that would be stretching it.
Predictably, WALL-E falls for EVE right away, and is crestfallen when upon showing her a live plant that he has found, she snatches the plant away, starts displaying a green ecology symbol on her shell, and shuts down completely ... awaiting ... well, it doesn't do to spill the whole plot to our viewers.
Suffice to say, they both end up back at the Axiom, on the other side of our galaxy - where it has been moored for 700 years. The ship itself is a brilliant critique of consumerism taken to its ultimate extreme. Robots produce everything it's human inhabitants need - all sporting the BnL brand, of course - and throw the waste into space. Humanity clearly has not gotten past its wasteful ways.
However, the robots have cared for so many of humanity's needs, that they have all grown too fat to walk - carted around by hovering robot chairs, as they are, every day of their lives from babyhood onward. Every corner of the ship is just wall-to-wall ads. Fashion changes are dictated by the robots - which everyone instantly adopts - and people seem to subsist on a diet of junk food (hence the obesity, along with the issue of bone loss from living in "micro-gravity"). Actually, the science in the movie is rather good, which is nice to see in a children's flick for a change.
A bad guy character is introduced in the form of the Axiom's auto-pilot (called Auto), and conflict ensues over whether the ship will be allowed to return back to Earth now that it can sustain life again. There are even a bunch of helpful activist robots who are portrayed as damaged robots in need of repair - an apt comparison that I could easily transpose to many real life progressive activists I know.
The film's conclusion, given that it's a children's movie, is a given, but it's a wild and entertaining ride getting there. And a touching one, as WALL-E and EVE show more feeling and emote far better as their relationship develops than many human actors in many a recent Hollywood pic (cough ... Hayden Christensen ... hack ... drove the nails in the Star Wars coffin ... sputter ... even after George Lucas jumped the shark).
It's worth shelling out the bucks to see WALL-E in on a big screen, although you'll enjoy it just as much if you wait until it comes out on DVD. Great fun for the whole family - and "edutainment" too. A winning combination all-in-all.
Highly Recommended.
