Wall-E

There is a lot about Wall-E that I can really get behind. For starters, it's really freaking adorable, precious, and whimsical. Wall-E is an immediately endearing character, whose quirks and innocent curiosity make him impossible to not care about. Once he meets his robot crush, Eve, the cute goes right through the roof. He's also kind of a Forrest Gump kind of character, who changes the world around him, not by his specific actions, but by the nature of his being. The other people in Wall-E's world see him the way we do, and like us, wish to be more like him: more fascinated and more devoted.

Environmentally speaking, the film also raises a lot of important questions. And when I say questions, I mean literal questions. When children watch this movie and see that the Earth is covered in garbage, and that all of the humans are obese, they will ask why, and their parents or guardains will have an incredible opportunity to challenge themselves to give the best possible answer. These are issues that are entirely relevent to the future of the earth, and by presenting them as normalcy, the filmmakers confuse and disturb the younger audience enough to start asking life-shaping questions.

That being said, the movie was not always troubling for intentional reasons. For one thing, the movie tends to be suspicious of globalization. Everything in the world is supplied by BNL (Buy N Large), a sort of Wal-Mart/Costco monster chain that eventually takes over the universe. That's all well and good, and I'm certainly in support of suspicion of corporate entities, but let's make sure we don't forget that this is Disney movie. The biggest media/entertainment company in the world is suggesting that we should be leery of enormous, monopolizing corporations. Is this an instance of a company worrying only about the bottom line, and not eh threatening message that it carries? Or (and I hope this is the case) is it a matter of corporate self-consciousness, where even the people who profit from such endeavours acknowledge that they cannot be trusted blindly.

On the opposite side of the environmental message is a wholly depressing. One of the first images of the filim is of a field of wind turbines covered in litter. Apparently renewable energy isn't going to save us.

The part of the movie that I was most troubled by was part of one of the most touching sequences. Sorry if this spoils anything, but once Eve completes her mission on Earth, she automatically shuts down. Wall-E panics and does everything he can to wake her up and protect her from the elements while in this comatose state. This is when it gets weird. Even though she's unconscious, he takes her on a date. He paddles her around on a boat, and then, while watching a sunset, tries to wrench her arm appendagece away from her body in order to hold her hand. Throughout the movie, this action (hand-holding) is set up, for Wall-E as the ultimate form of intimacy. So then, why is it cute when he tries to move to the next level of their relationship while she is unconscious? The fact that his hand gets caught, although funny, doesn't make it okay. That he's been nice to her doesn't make it okay. If I were to make a move on someone while they were so clearly far gone that I had to pull them around on a leash, I would expect to do jail time. Robot date rape is still date rape.

Having said that, that scene takes up about 40 seconds of the film, which is otherwise free of most morally questionable relationship practices.

Rating: 4.0 stars