We went to see Wall-E tonight before leaving for a weekend at my parents. It lives up to Pixar’s usually high standards and Ora 5 and Aspen sat through the whole thing; we measure movies by their ability to hold our kids attention. Ewan even made it an hour and a half before he became to restless to stay in the theater. This is especially impressive since the movie has little dialogue. Very few words are spoken for the first 45 minutes to an hour of the movie, but it is still able to convey a lot of information and you are never confused by what is happening. I found myself wondering what the writer’s, Andrew Stanton, script looked like. Pages and pages of description rather than dialogue.
On the surface it is a very simple adventure and love story; however, very early in the movie I began to notice some underlying ideas. I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, so if you want to read on click here.
So, you want to read more? Okay. There are several interesting themes in Wall-E that caused me to review the movie several times afterward. I would even say that it took away from my movie watching experience a bit because I was so focused on looking for these undercurrents, that I didn’t just sit and enjoy the movie as a simple adventure/love story.
We are destroying our planet
This idea was shown in the commercials and I expected this to be THE major moral of the story, but it is not. That we are destroying the planet is told literally in passing: In the first few minutes of the movie Wall-E passes old newspapers which tell how the planet is too polluted to live on and TVs that show how life will be great on Axiom, the ship upon which all humans left earth. It is used to setup the “period” in which Wall-E lives, but there is no moralizing on the subject.
Wall-E is anti-Big Box Stores
Again as Wall-E rolls through his world, we see that every store is a “Buy-N-Large” store. Grocery stores, clothing stores, gas stations, etc. Buy-N-Large seems to be the only company that exist in the near future.
Beware the corporatacracy
Buy-N-Large is not only the Earth’s only retailer, they are also the government. This point is subtly made and again there is no moralizing. The president of Buy-N-Large is shown several times through archived footage. Each time he is shown it is before a blue curtain with a oval seal that says Buy-N-Large Headquarters” or something to that affect. He stands before a podium that has a round seal that says “CEO of Buy-N-Large” in the same style as the President of the United States’ seal. Everything about the CEO is designed to give the appearance that he runs the planet. This was confirmed when I was looking at a children’s Wall-E book that stated that exact fact.
The newspapers make it clear that Buy-N-Large, being the only retailer and the government, is responsible for destroying our planet, promised to clean it up so everyone could later return and then abandoned their responsibility to clean the planet.
In a major plot point it is revealed that the Buy-N-Large CEO has ordered the computers to never return to Earth and to prevent the humans from trying. It shows that Buy-N-Large is arrogant in that they make decisions that cannot be reversed in affect acting as if they believe that they know what’s best for us 700 years into the future.
Wall-E is more human than humans
Wall-E is a very endearing character and very early on we see how much emotion he has and how lonely he is. He quickly falls in love with Eve and longs to hold her hand as he has seen in old movies.
When Wall-E encounters his first humans aboard the Axiom, he finds that they do not communicate directly to each other and our oblivious to other people. Their children are raised by robots. Wall-E has more emotion than humans do evoking a Bladerunner theme.
Consumerism is bad
Human on the Axiom are ultra-consumers and every desire is gratified immediately. All food is consumed as a shake. Billboards everywhere promote new items to buy which the humans can instantly purchase.
We are lazy, fat people
Every human in the future is fat. They are transported on floating chairs and never walk. The reason they are fat is noted by the Buy-N-Large CEO in archive video: “You may have lost some bone density” as pictures of increasingly fat people show on the bottom of the screen; however, it is easy to infer that the real reason is because no one exercises. The CEO’s video says that their bone-density loss can be fixed with “a couple of laps around the track” to which the captain says “We have one of those?” In another scene a pool is mentioned and someone says “We have one of those?” The message is clearly that they did not get fat because their in space; they got fat because the laziness that we display now only continues into the future.
The ending credits depict live after the humans return to earth and the longer the credits roll the thinner the humans become.
Some posts have called Wall-E anti-American and anti-Wal-Mart. If being American means being fat, lazy, emotionless, ulta-consumers who are letting corporations like Wal-Mart have too much influence over our government, then I guess they are right.
I wanted to end on a positive note: Wall-E is a positive influence on everyone he encounters. When he encounters the first human, John, he literally knocks John out of the status quo and awakens him to the things around him. He also does this to a female human and she and John re-experience everything they have not noticed before. When he encounters the captain, the dirt on Wall-E causes the captain to want to learn everything about their abandoned planet. When Wall-E encounters a group of malfunctioning robots (imagine an insane asylum for robots), they band together to help Wall-E save the day. People and robots become more than they were before their encounter with Wall-E.
