WALL*E Tells Us About Ourselves

Rogue Robots -- Picture courtesy of Pixar

by blogSpotter
This weekend I was under the weather so stayed in and watched a lot of movies. One that I watched is Pixar’s WALL*E about a lone (and lonely) sanitation engineering robot. The movie is set far in the future – where Earth has been horribly polluted and trashed up by an over-consuming society. The humans have fled to a giant mothership (called Axiom) while waiting for robots to clean and de-pollute the Earth for rehabitation.

WALL*E has Pixar’s stunning detail and beauty – it’s what we’ve come to expect from Pixar. But it has an allegory built in that many adults could stand to see and appreciate. The humans have been living on the Axiom for 700 years. The Axiom is a giant citadel spaceship with fabulous food and amenities for its inhabitants. It looks like a giant futuristic resort hotel inside a humongous space ship. The humans have been ship-bound and weightless for so long, they’ve become inactive and dependent on robot servants. Their bones have atrophied, their bodies have become large and doughy and most of them can’t even walk anymore, they ride around on air scooters.

A certain perniciousness becomes apparent – the humans all have floating hi-def TV screens in front of their faces. They’ve lost touch with each other. They’re barraged with junk food ads and most are chowing down on shakes or fries while they succumb to the pleasant blandness of TV commercials. It turns out that the robot pilots have slowly fattened and seduced the humans into complacency, with no intention of ever returning to Earth.

I won’t say what all happens (you could safely guess a happy ending and the good guys win). What amazed me about the Axiom society was how much it resembles Dallas in 2008 – all they did was push it to an extreme. Axiom featured a megalomaniacal corporation called “Buy and Large” playing a major role in the polluting of Earth, necessitating the cleanup. I challenge people to watch this movie and NOT see a family member among the humans depicted.

Of course the robots are highly humanized and adorable. Walle and Eve (Eve is the bio resurgence detection robot) make a cute couple at the movie’s finale. Pixar even did the impossible and they made a cockroach (Walle’s pet) extremely cute. For any number of reasons – sci-fi gadgetry, fattened space humans and cute cockroaches, WALL*E is an allegory well worth seeing for people of all ages.

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