Kontan Jou

I took the girls to see WALL-E yesterday and have to say it was the cutest movie I have seen in a while. It is really surprising how good it was considering dialogue is limited and it is an animated robot love flick.

There are several themes running through this movie and maybe it will help people stand up and take note. I am not exactly what you would call a tree hugger, but I do appreciate the great outdoors and feel that on some level we need to protect the environment, as well as get off our hind-ends and enjoy it. I’m happy to see that it is now cool to be green, but unfortunately the biggest proponents of “green” are hypocrites. Their hypocrisy turns off people who may have the potential to embrace “green” projects. But I digress…WALL-E reveals the world as it could be…covered in trash with people light years away at a space resort lazy, fat, ignorant, and reveling in techno stuff. It really is an indication as to where society is headed and what we embrace.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, either because you haven’t seen the movie or you haven’t been to a movie in so long you have not been overexposed to the WALL-E preview (which was way overplayed), then let me offer a little explanation.

WALL-E is a robot, among many robots, created to clean Earth while the humans are away. Trash took over the land and living on Earth was hazardous. A mega-corporation, BnL, created an army of little box robots programmed to collect trash, compact it into squares, and stack it neatly into skyscraper like piles. For citizens, BnL offered a space resort cruise. Citizens would be waited on hand and foot in a resort atmosphere. There were even seat transporters for those physically unable to walk around and enjoy the resort. Well, 750 years and many captains later, the people on the space resort were all physically unable to walk around the resort and everyone had their own seat transporter. While on Earth the lone WALL-E, and his cockroach friend, had outlasted all the other WALL-E bots and continued toiling away at garbage collection and compaction. WALL-E had also developed a personality. (Think Johnny-5, Short Circuit.)

Axiom, the space resort, had been sending out life searching bots for centuries. Each bot returned from Earth with a report of no life detected…until Eve. Several hundred years after leaving Earth an Axiom captain determined that life on Earth was impossible and the people should never return. This was coded into the resort system to prevent future captains from initiating the return sequence.

Now, when Eve is dropped on Earth WALL-E is immediately infatuated with the beautiful piece of technology. With a good bit of effort he appeals to her good circuits, then offers her a token of his love…a plant that he found under an old refrigerator and had tossed in a boot. Eve was delighted, then went into bot mode where she collected the specimen, notified home base, and shut down. WALL-E was, of course, confused and devastated. He attempted to revive her with solar exposure and carried her with him to various favorite spots only to receive no response. Giving up, he went back to trash collection and compaction, only to frantically rush back to his WALL-E fort when Eve was being collected by the space module.

Since this review surpassed long a paragraph or so ago I will be brief in explaining the rest. WALL-E and Eve spend the remainder of the movie on Axiom attempting to initiate the Earth return sequence by retrieving the stolen plant and helping the captain get it to the teleport thingy, all the while building their personal network connection and falling in love.

The movie is sweet, cute, and has a good message. All this and family friendly too…hard combination to find these days. Another Pixar classic, I have to say two thumbs up.