Going into Wall-E on Sunday I knew a few things.

1) It was a Pixar film, meaning beautiful animation and cute characters

2) It was an eco-parable. On purpose I didn’t read much about the film, but I knew that is was somehow supposed to bring up the earth.

3) I would probably like it because I like things about robots.

When I left Wall-E all my thoughts (while true) had been turned upside down as I realized I had just seen a politically radical Disney film! And more than that it was chock full of cinematic references!

At the core of Wall-E is a the story of how humanity ruined the earth. The opening scene features our little hero, a garbage compactor robot named Wall-E, who it seems has spent the last 700+ years trying to clean up the earth. There are no people on this earth as they have all been evacuated to fancy space stations where robots wait on them hand and foot. The people aboard the stations are constantly consuming, while simultaneously losing the ability to connect with each other and to engage their own bodies in any type of physical activity.

But before we learn of humanity’s twisted fate, we spend some quiet time learning about the routine of our hero and what life on earth means after our trashing of it. Watching Wall-E construct buildings out of compacted trash, only to return home to watch Hello Dolly (wow right?!) on repeat and play with the treasures he finds in the trash made my heart quiver with happiness, it is for those moments that I go to the movies.  Wall-E doesn’t talk, so we spend the beginning of the film immersed in image instead of typical Disney slapstick dialogue. The simple beauty of a scene where Wall-E finds a lonely plant that has survived in an old refrigerator says more about our loss of connection with nature than any documentary could.

Beyond the dilapidated buildings and heaps of trash, the landscape is surrounded by memories of a company called Buy n Large. It appears that BnL was the conglomerate of all conglomerates, owning every store in site and initiating humanity’s flight into space. *An interesting aside, there appears to be a fake website for Buy n Large : http://www.buynlarge.com/ that looks eerily similar to many websites that actually exist today.

Overwhelming images of consumerism gone awry accompany anything to do with BnL and even the name stands as a societal critique on excess purchasing. While the environment is a fairly safe issue to attach oneself to these days, I am surprised that Disney has made such a strong statement on consumerism, especially for a film that no doubt has an entire product line overtaking the shelves of every Toys R Us. But still, any major film, despite hypocritical product lines and placement (the Apple references were ridiculous), that features a huge corporation as it’s villain seems a victory in and of itself. Especially considering the majority of viewers will be children.

Politics aside, Wall-E is mostly a love story between Wall-E and Eve (wink wink) a robot sent from the space station and designed to look for plant life on earth. The innocent courtship that occurs between Wall-E and Eve is something I haven’t seen in a new movie in some time - the closest thing being the first third of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times, which coincidentally also gets it’s emotional climax from the significance of holding hands. As we’re allowed to actually see more and say more in our films today, we often lose the intelligence and simplicity present in films from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Wall-E, being a children’s film, has to be more creative with it’s references thus allowing us to explore a world where everything can’t be expressed outright. We then get the joy of emerging ourselves in a world where things aren’t necessarily pretty but nonetheless fill us with a sense of wonder.

takepart to learn more about freeganism, a group of folks, that much like Wall-E, get what they need from what people have thrown out. You can easily adopt parts of freeganism into your life and help prevent the future that exists in Wall-E.

Read on:

• Disney’s “WALL-E” wows North American box office
• Pixar’s Wall-E Just a Feature-length iPod Ad?
• Taking the (Dumpster) Plunge

And just because, here is a scene from Hello Dolly: