A mega-corporation that controls virtually every aspect of media, entertainment, and shopping, promoting rampant consumerism. Hmmmm....

Although Wall-E the robot is cute, I'm not a big fan of cutseyness in the form of the little Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth Class trying on a bra or being propelled wildly by a discharging fire extinguisher. Physical humor, particularly with no dialogue, is okay in very small doses but I have to emphasize: small.

Thus I wasn't expecting to like Wall-E too much...until it got to the second half of the story. The first half is centered around the "Awww, how cute" adventures of the title robot as he diligently labors to clean up a trashed Planet Earth, one compacted cube at a time. He's been laboring for the past 700 years and is the last of his kind, the clean-up effort having failed miserably. We watch him pick out ironic treasures to save, such as tossing away a diamond ring but tenderly keeping the fascinating hinged box, and take digitally animated lumps and pratfalls as he encounters various pieces of garbage.

Okay...ho hum...let's get things moving here. And move they do, in the form of EVE, a robot sent to Earth on a specific mission. Fascinated by this newcomer, Wall-E tries diligently to befriends her despite the fact that she repeatedly tries to blow him away. A devoted fan of the movie "Hello Dolly," Wall-E wants nothing more than to get close and hold her hand...but the deadly blaster gun housed in her arm and her defensive attitude makes that rather unlikely.

The movie drags through those parts, but picks up considerably once the two robots head off to the Axiom, a giant space cruise ship on which humans have lived for the past 700 years since Earth is uninhabitable. I won't get into the whats and whys yet, since I don't want to spoil the plot, but I just loved Pixar's portrayal of what humanity comes to in a few hundred years: Whale-sized lumps of flesh in jumpsuits, riding around on hoverloungers with their faces jammed into video screens...the only way they talk to each other, even if they are side-by-side. Look around you at the fleets of electric scooters, the expanding American gut, and people sipping smoothies with glazed eyes and a cell-phone surgically attached to their ear, and you'll realize that Pixar isn't too far off.

And ironically, I've heard many times that Buy N Large, the company who provides all this, is a parody of Wal-Mart. But do they own TV networks? No, Disney's got ABC, ESPN and the Disney Channel. Do they provide entertainment? No, but I won't even go into Disney's media empire. Do they run giant space-going cruise ships? No, but Disney does...yes, their ships are of the earth-bound, ocean going style right now, but I'm sure a space version will be launched someday. In my view, Buy N Large is the perfect ironic send-up of Disney, plopped right into a Disney movie. Delicious!

WARNING: SPOILERS START HERE

But as much as I enjoyed the parody of what humanity becomes, there were plot holes that I couldn't quite get beyond, especially since the most major one would have been easy to fix. The cruise ship Axiom left Earth presumably for five years, which is the timeframe Buy N Large thought would be necessary for Earth's clean-up. Unfortunately the task was impossible, so humanity remained in space for the next 695 years, getting progressively fatter and more lazy.

Eve's purpose was to search for plant life; finding it would supposedly show that Earth could sustain life again, thus prompting the Axiom to return. But we learn that the CEO of Buy N Large, due to the planet's toxicity, programmed the Autopilot to keep it in space forever. That is the pivotal plot point that spurs all of the conflict, but it inherently makes no sense. Why would the CEO want humans NEVER to return? Sure, he doesn't want them to come back while Earth is still trashed and toxic, but why instill that program forever, especially when a plant has been found? Or why not just be honest about it, instead of making a secret program change?

It would have been much better to have him desire to keep the Axiom in space forever so that humans would remain under Buy N Large's captive thumb. Make the corporation the evil captor...that would have been a lot more logical.

Still, you have to ask yourself: where is Buy N Large getting the raw materials to create all the new foods and products on the spaceship anyway? Where do the babies come from, since people don't seem to be physically capable of mating? Why is only one Wall-E left? Why are most of the things Wall-E is finding in the trash out of the 80s and 90s? The Axiom had to leave at some point in the fairly far future, since robots and spaceships are perfected and quite fancy, so where is the stuff that came inbetween? I could go on and on, but I'll just stop right there.

Still, if you are good at suspension of disbelief and enjoy irony, Wall-E is a fun little romp. I liked it better than I thought I would, so I guess that says something right there. It's not Pixar's best effort ("The Incredibles" takes that honor), but it's cute and I love how it pokes fun at Disney without most people even realizing it. Go see Wall-E, then look at the world around you and you'll see that Pixar is pretty dead on.

Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Feel-good Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Pacing