It is hundreds of years into the future and Earth has been abandoned by the humans who, through their massive and uncontrolled consumerism, made it uninhabitable. When they fled in a cushy cruise spaceship (there’s more space in Space, after all), they left behind a fleet of robots to clean up their mess. Now only one remains functioning—WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class)—your basic solar-powered trash compactor, one that has managed to keep operating while the rest have long since bit the dust. Has he somehow evolved while the rest did not? Whatever the reason, he certainly exhibits some curious humanoid traits: he keeps a pet cockroach that follows him everywhere; he retires for the night in a trailer fitted with lights and furnished with human artefacts; he’s able to replace faulty parts himself using spare parts salvaged from his no-longer-functioning counterparts; he plays taped music while he works and seems particularly taken with certain scenes from the musical, Hello Dolly!, where characters dance, sing to each other, and hold hands.

WALL-E’s routine existence is thrown into disarray when a spaceship arrives one day and disgorges a state-of-the-art robot of a pleasingly (for WALL-E) female persuasion. Sleek and gorgeous (for a robot), the aptly-named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is on a search mission: her directive is to find any trace of living organism left on Earth. Instantly smitten with this delectable new entity, WALL-E tries to establish some connection between them, but her single-mindedness is such that when she’s presented with the sole living thing left on Earth, she immediately enters into a catatonic phase to await her retrieval by her spaceship.

But WALL-E is loath to let her go, and when her spaceship returns for her, he hitches the ride of his life. They end up on a space station where humans have whiled away several generations, not to mention bone mass and any sense of purpose. How they’ve survived hundreds of years (where do provisions derive from, for a start?) is not touched upon. But what is certain is that WALL-E’s encounter with humans and other robots leaves him much the worse for wear, but does nothing to deter his resolve to connect with EVE.

Will WALL-E survive his adventures in space? How will EVE, intent on following her directive to the letter, cope with an amorous WALL-E? And what’s with those lazy, obese humans anyway? Is the ineffectual Captain really in charge, or has Otto, the sinister computer autopilot, taken over the controls both literally and metaphorically?

Pixar has made a name for itself with animated feature films that push the limits of innovation, originality, and sheer technical wizardry. WALL-E is no exception and is yet another gem to add to Pixar’s crown.

Characterization is king in any story worth its salt, and WALL-E is hard not to love, a gentle robotic Chaplinesque hero with ET eyes, a yen for odd human artefacts, and a poignant yearning for connection.

The highly ambitious use of scope and scale—space and planets in all their vastness, an abandoned and polluted Earth hauntingly grim and scarily realistic—gives a stunning perspective of Man/robot’s place (tiny and insignificant indeed) in the greater scheme of the Universe.

And then, there is the moxie and assurance of doing away with cinematic conventions—there is almost no dialogue for much of the first half of the movie, leaving the viewer to be dazed by the powerful visuals, both animation and sets.

So, is it dystopic, post-apocalyptic, SciFi? Or is it sentimental, feel-good, family fare? Strangely enough, it’s both, or rather, all things to all people. Young children will enjoy WALL-E’s charming antics; older ones will marvel at the well-drawn technology of robots and spaceships, planets and space stations; grown-ups will appreciate the tongue-in-cheek depiction of a sedentary and aimless life-style and its associated depredations (and the dialogue this should open up with younger family members).

The more cynical among us might rue the irony of Disney (Pixar’s big brother) castigating its customers for a certain way of life—a constant demand for ease and convenience, for fast food and entertainment, for instant gratification—that Disney itself, not to mention countless huge corporations like it, encourage and benefit from.

Also, the over-anthropomorphizing of WALL-E does beg the questions: Can robots be programmed, however inadvertently, to feel? Can they, left to their own devices, manage to evolve? Flame wars already rage over the ‘cop-out’ ending, and while this viewer agrees that the ‘honest’ ending would have been so much more poignant, the fact remains that tickets must be sold, and an animated feature geared towards youngsters would not fare too well if said youngsters left the cinema in floods of tears.

Part cautionary tale, part timely parable, WALL-E is a musing on loneliness and connection, on how we are blinded by our constant need to be entertained, by our growing dependence on new-fangled technology—blinded to the person next to us, we overlook our humanity, our ability to connect one-on-one with other living breathing human beings—when even a robot knows that the most important thing of all is by far the most basic and fundamental: before you can even entertain the concepts of faith, hope and love, you need to connect with one another. For without connection, we are but a speck of dust adrift in the Universe—aimless and meaningless.


Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Family Movie
Viewing Method: Studio Screening/Premiere
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.