Stay the Course

Steve Jobs gets thanked in the credits for Pixar’s Wall-E, but its central theme owes plenty to Al Gore and the general proliferation of environmental awareness. The slapstick fable begins on future Earth’s abandoned wasteland and concludes with its renewal: A child’s fantasy as panacea. Wall-E codifies the save-our-planet dictum by injecting it with charm—something no snazzy PowerPoint show could possibly accomplish. “You just needed someone to look after you,” remarks the bloated captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin) of a ship where mankind’s last seeds reside. He’s addressing a plant—not unlike Mark Wahlberg in M. Night Shyamalan’s downbeat The Happening, but the message here is comparatively optimistic. The titular robot, a trash compactor left behind until a newer machine comes back to look for traces of organic life, pursues his new companion—and inadvertently saves the human race. The lesson plan can’t be ignored, but not to the detriment of the story. The green initiative has hit pop culture, but at least it does so with feeling.

Still, there’s still a definite appreciation for electronic progress in Wall-E, which relegates modern gadgets to objects of curious vintage. Jobs’ iPod gets a rather romantic cameo, the jingle of a rebooted computer becomes a running gag, and at least one kind of technological development gets championed—Pixar’s. Whether managing Earth’s golden trash piles or soaring through space, Wall-E inhabits a familiar territory. It’s truly the sum of Pixar’s accomplishments—combining the hyperbolically rotund faces of The Incredibles, the sleek interiors of Monsters Inc. and sprawling outdoor regions first enlivened by Finding Nemo (director Andrew Stanton’s last credit with the studio). Unlike other studios, Pixar tries to make its movies look good without reinventing the engine for each outing. It’s the details of the design that make Wall-E’s world seem believable. Virtually plotless and without dialogue for its first 45 minutes (and still relying more on expressive mechanical bursts than spoken words even after that), Wall-E forces viewers to absorb the subtleties of its visual flair, whether it’s swift imitation of authentic camera work or a startlingly immediate sense of place. In the sweeping introductory shot, we witness a post-apocalyptic realm where the windmills no longer churn and the strip malls trumpet ads to an audience that left long ago. Wall-E, however, sees none of the grime. Joyfully going about his business of making trash piles and assembling bedtime mixtapes, he’s a lovable simpleton adrift in Mad Max’s playground (earlier comparisons to Jacques Tati are fair).

When a probe named Eve arrives to scope out the planet, Wall-E is smitten. He desperately follows her to deep space at the conclusion of her mission, and the pace begins to accelerate. As the environment changes, it’s clear that the movie owes a lot to the near-future genre. The ship’s computer looks identical to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, while a later chase sequence when Wall-E and Eve become fugitives (or “rogue robots”) recalls a similar one in Minority Report. Stanton’s screenplay imagines lazy humans devolved into fat and incompetent beings, wasting their days in wheelchairs equipped with video screens, not unlike the knuckleheads found in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. The very premise of a spaceship race unaware of its natural origins recalls the plot of Robert A. Heinlein’s spooky 1963 novel Orphans in the Sky. Wall-E isn’t quite as profound, but juxtaposed against the cold detachment of space opera aesthetics, its bumbling antihero possesses comic vitality.

As sci-fi narratives go, the film’s jubilance might have no parallels, but its poignancy has the familiar ring of a romantic comedy. When Wall-E takes Eve, whose wiring enforces her destructive tendencies, to his humble bachelor pad, her loosening up mimics Garbo’s first laugh. When their relationship picks up speed, we get the first step in the larger ideological construction: The couple becomes entranced—and, it’s hinted, aroused—at the sight of fire, a primal force transcending all technological excesses. What follows shows the ugly results of such an extreme: On the ship, people have grown fat and stupid, unknowing victims of corporate overload provided by the dominant owner mysteriously known as Buy ‘n’ Large, which encourages imprudence in the name self-sustainment (“Too much garbage in your space? There’s plenty of space in space.”).

The plot, when it finally arrives, has a few unforgivable holes, but the thing never stops being a marvel to behold, and the concept holds steady. When it comes to moral convictions, Pixar’s screenplays always score where most mainstream family stories fail. “Change is nature” formed the heart of Ratatouille. “They keep creating new standards to celebrate mediocrity,”‘ fumed The Incredibles. There’s a darker contemporary hook in Wall-E when a former Earth leader (Fred Willard) encourages his minions to “‘stay the course,” but that was Pixar’s rhetoric before it belong to the Bush administration. Thirteen years after Toy Story, Pixar has stayed its own unique course.