WALL-E

WALL-E. Andrew Stanton, dir., script, with Jim Capobianco ("titles" [sic]). Ralph Eggleston et al., production design. USA: Pixar/Walt Disney (prod.) Buena Vista and Walt Disney (dist.), 2008.

As in the SHORT CIRCUIT films (cited in Clockworks [1] under Drama), the star is a cute, male-gendered robot, but here without much competition from humans and with a strange love of HELLO, DOLLY (1969). As Kenneth Turnan explains in a rave review in The L.A. Times, WALL-E's name "is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter -- Earth Class[…, meaning] that WALL-E is a robotic trash compactor who has been quietly doing his job attacking Earth's endless mountains of refuse for 700 years. Unless you count his pal, a nameless but convivial roach, WALL-E is the only thing still moving on the entire planet" . A survey ship arrives and WALL-E gets a robotic love-interest, a beautiful and thoroughly modern probe named "Eve," whom WALL-E woos, although we get with him only a few more hints at human language use than we get with R2-D2 in the STAR WARS movies. Since the privileged goal in the film is returning humans to Earth, the antagonist is the main character blocking that goal: a mutinous autopilot on an ark-ship called Axiom, with HAL-9000's red and yellow eye from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (the film is a trove of allusions). The autopilot and his (male gender again, not sex) robotic minions try to keep the remnants of the human species obese, obedient, and contented—and safe—on the Axiom, so these robots are comparable to J. Williamson's Humanoids (q.v., in Clockworks [1], under Fiction). Note also a highly funkified, pomo Earth, with Industrial imagery, contrasted with the even more sterile Modernism of the Axiom. For those of us who refer to the Disney operation as "The Rat," this is a surprisingly good movie (well-received by critics and audiences), with solid satire against consumerism and environmental irresponsibility and brilliant use of Pixar technology to create a ravaged future Earth as an industrial wasteland-as-garbage-dump. (On the other hand, a colleague points out "by making the aud[ience] feel good about our heightened environmental awareness and our fresh anti-consumerist leanings […] 'The Rat' [might be] trying to keep the [...] human species obese, obedient and buying every kind of Wall-E consumer product they can crank out, of which the packaging will soon be overflowing a landfill near you. Rat or Humanoid? Either way, fiendishly brilliant.")

For images, see .

5. DRAMA, RDE, JK, 27/VI/08