An adorable robot cannibalizes his peers. Babies are produced in questionable ways.
An allegory for screen addiction from one of the biggest media companies in the world?
These are the things only adults notice while watching WALL-E.
In retrospect, it's clear that 2008 was a simpler time. It was only two years after
the documentary An Inconvenient Truth began to really spread awareness of the threat that
global warming posed to the planet, and the more broadly sinister blanket term "climate
change" was hardly in the news at all. The ensuing years have seen an increasing
number of record-setting temperatures at various points all over the world.
With them has come more frequent wildfires, polar vortexes, unusually active hurricane seasons,
and countless other disasters that are all attributable to climate change.
WALL-E is almost quaint in representing the harm that we've done to the planet. Our small,
resolute Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class robot has apparently spent
centuries packing refuse into cubes, making for a strikingly apt visual metaphor. But
even though we aren't yet piling garbage so high that it towers over skyscrapers, trash is indeed
a big part of the real climate crisis in reality. Landfills are estimated to account for ten percent
of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, in addition to causing a host of other environmental issues.
The backdrop of WALL-E was already one of the most chilling and relevant settings for any
kids movie when it came out, and it only becomes more terrifyingly relevant with each passing year.
Even if you can summon the will to set the reality of climate concerns aside and just
let WALL-E cast its spell on you, the central premise is still almost unbearably sad. There's
just no way to look past the fact that WALL-E is a small robot whose sole purpose is to
condense waste into neatly stacked cubes. He's been laboring at this job for around
700 years on a deserted planet Earth, with only a cockroach and a trailer full of junk for company.
The opening scenes of the movie are set to a jaunty show tune, and they manage to mine
some humor out of WALL-E's confused reactions to recognizable everyday objects. But if you actually
stop and think about this robot's existence, it's a rather maudlin way for a film to begin.
Fortunately, WALL-E only takes us through one day in the life of its impossibly lonely
protagonist before a mysterious rocket lands and the real adventure begins.
But for the first ten minutes or so, kids and adults alike are invited to
contemplate solitude and futility in the bleakest opening in Pixar history.
Not only does WALL-E have a premise that's both horrifically sad and
unnervingly relevant, it's also largely about two robots that
only say a half-dozen words or so between the two of them. When you think about it,
it's amazing that audiences were able to emotionally connect with the story at all.
That they did is in large part thanks to songs from the 1969 movie musical Hello, Dolly!
WALL-E has managed to find a VHS copy of this particular film that improbably still works, and
repeated clips of just two of its songs serve as emotional shorthand at several different points.
The peppy "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" serves as the enervating, ironic choice to open the movie
as we zoom in on the polluted, empty Earth. It then goes on to be a theme song for both
WALL-E's curiosity and optimism, as well as a rallying cry for his robot brethren aboard the
Axiom spaceship. Meanwhile, "It Only Takes A Moment" is the theme song for WALL-E and EVE's
romantic connection. There's even a scene set to "La Vie En Rose" by Louis Armstrong,
who also appeared in Hello, Dolly! Thanks to the contributions of a classic musical,
alongside Thomas Newman's subtle yet wonderful score, revisiting WALL-E as an adult really
makes you consider how much music can accomplish in a nearly wordless film.
In the future presented in WALL-E, the corporation Buy N Large is indistinguishable from the
government. CEO Shelby Forthright, played in a few scenes by Fred Willard in live-action,
speaks from a podium in front of a blue backdrop that looks a lot like the White House. It's
implied that Buy N Large is solely responsible for "Operation Cleanup," the plan to save Earth
while humanity is off-world on luxury space cruise ships. It's something that initially seems darkly
ironic and silly, but it has grim and sinister implications that only get more uncomfortable for
those of us who've aged through major recessions and government misconduct over the years.
"Because at BNL, space is the final FUN-tier!"
You might think that Disney, who bought Pixar just a couple years before "WALL-E" was released,
wouldn't want to pull the thread on how giant corporations with government ties
are leading us down a ruinous environmental path. Of course,
this was before Disney went on to acquire Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Fox,
so it wasn't as on the nose at the time as it is today. Still, it's more than a little ironic
in retrospect how the general theme of WALL-E seems to tell us to stop being such consumers,
even though the movie is a commercial product from one of the biggest companies in human history.
Another thing that we may have already forgotten about life in 2008 is that screens weren't as
omnipresent in our lives as they are now. Most phones were still of the flip variety, and
plenty of people still used Blackberries. Devices then weren't nearly as entrancing as modern-day
smartphones with their endless apps, games, and constant demand on our attention. Netflix had
just barely introduced its streaming service, so YouTube was the only real video streaming option,
with only a fraction of the content that it has today. In the years since,
streaming has become ubiquitous, and if we're not careful about our screen time habits,
then we'll find ourselves in an existence that's basically a planet-sized version of the Axiom.
Most chillingly, especially after the mass shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic,
WALL-E's human characters are seen using a Zoom-like interface in their hoverchair
displays to talk to each other, instead of just getting up and having face-to-face interactions.
Meanwhile in the real world, we've got screens in our cars,
screens on our appliances, and screens on our wristwatches.
Devices are getting so "smart" that it will be a great challenge for modern humanity to remember
that we're on a planet and not a spaceship. Thus, WALL-E serves as a helpful cautionary
tale to remind us that we can't completely rely on this so-called "smart" technology.
"My nephew bought me a smartphone for 'Crimmus.'"
"If it's so smart, why can't I get a driver's license?"
It's only through WALL-E's chaotic influence that we see two humans on the Axiom, Mary and John,
start to interact with each other and accidentally hold hands. The novelty of it shines on their
delighted, bashful faces. For adult viewers, however, an unsettling thought comes crashing
in to undercut it: if that's where people are in the future in terms of potential relationships,
then how have new babies been born on the Axiom for the last 700 years? We distinctly
see a group of toddlers being taught by robots in a day care earlier in the film,
but considering that we also see the captain of the Axiom struggling to walk in a later scene,
it's a safe bet that nobody on the ship is doing anything much more strenuous than that.
The implication is obviously that, somewhere on the ship,
there's a place where humans are grown instead of born, perhaps Matrix-style.
Just how the machines on the ship make this happen, we can only imagine.
WALL-E is largely an allegory, and there are lots of things we don't learn about in terms
of day-to-day life on the Axiom. But the fact that we specifically get to see a group of babies
makes thoughts of “basic reproduction” unavoidable, and unavoidably unsettling.
WALL-E strikes a carefully calculated balance. Viewers need to identify with the main robot
so that they're not thinking too hard about environmental strife or the end of society.
It works remarkably well, except for how cavalierly WALL-E scavenges parts from
dead robots that look exactly like himself. First, he pauses by the remains of another
WALL-E unit to steal its tread. Afterward, when EVE damages one of his eyes, he casually reveals
that he has an entire shelf of discarded WALL-E parts to choose from to replace it.
For adult viewers, this can result in a strange cognitive dissonance. In the movie's emotional
climax, WALL-E has been so badly damaged that EVE has to replace several more parts and an
internal circuit board. We're left in doubt for a moment that WALL-E even remembers her,
as he may be a sort of undead Frankenstein's monster of other dead WALL-Es with no memory.
"It's alive, it's alive! It's alive!"
Everything ultimately turns out okay,
but only if you're willing to ignore WALL-E's robot cannibalism.
There's so much that WALL-E doesn't want you to think too hard about that it's hard to
come away with a clear moral lesson. Children's movies aren't obligated to have one, of course,
but they almost always offer some sort of message in the vein of "just be yourself."
WALL-E presents a vague theme about the difference between surviving and living,
but it can be hard to really connect it to anything particularly concrete.
Obviously we shouldn't let the planet drown in garbage or the atmosphere become toxic,
but what does WALL-E suggest we do to avoid it? The damage from climate change is so far-reaching
that it's baffling to know where to start as an individual to make a difference. Other than a
vague resolution to avoid excess screen time and not be a passenger on the proverbial Axiom of the
internet, there's not much that WALL-E leaves you with other than a warm feeling for cute robots.
That's great and all, but it won't get all that excess carbon dioxide out of the air.
The technology depicted in WALL-E was all apparently made around the year 2100,
when Earth was becoming uninhabitable. It includes spaceships that are still running perfectly after
several hundred years, food replicators that feed the entire ship's population to excess,
an endless array of robots, and hyperspace technology that gets
the Axiom back to Earth in a matter of seconds.
So with all of this technology at its disposal, how can it be that the best plan that humanity's
corporate overlords could conceive of was to leave a bunch of trash-scooping robots behind
and try to wait the crisis out on a cruise? Why not use the hyperspace tech to try to find other
planets to colonize? Why aren't there robots designed to scrub carbon from the atmosphere?
Why not shoot all the garbage on Earth into the sun? Perhaps there's an intentionally
cynical message in Buy N Large's plan to sell humans on a cruise to distract them from the
devastation that their own consumerism has wrought. But you would think that finding
a more efficient solution would be good for the company's bottom line as well.
The thing that really makes WALL-E great in the midst of all of its depressingly realistic
concerns about our present and future is the fact that it barely actually talks about those concerns
at all. The first half is basically a silent comedy, as we watch our plucky hero fill the
time as best he can. Then it becomes a breathless high-flying adventure when EVE shows up to shake
him from his routine. The music, score, and beautiful animation make WALL-E a singular film;
there's nothing else like it. After repeated viewings, you'll probably start to recognize
every little mumble and jittery noise that WALL-E makes as an extension of his personality.
"Di-rec-tive?"
"'Directive?' Classified!"
"Oh."
Dialogue forms the backbone of most movies. It's how characters
deliver key exposition and reveal their motivations, directly or indirectly.
So by largely forgoing spoken words, WALL-E achieves a once-in-a-century feat of storytelling.
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