Yes, I have a three year-old son, who joined me for this fine feature, but I am such a big fan of Pixar that I would have gone to see this "kids'" movie all by my lonesome if I needed to.
Wall-E is a robot whose job it is to clean up the trash we humans have left on the Earth. In fact, the waste is so great (reaching piles higher than skyscrapers) that humans have had to leave the planet for a while, until things get livable again. So, day in and day out, Wall-E takes our trash and makes it into cubes. Along the way he picks up relics of our human history, like sporks. One day a foreign ship lands on Earth and out comes a much more advanced robot, Eve. Eve is looking for any signs of life. She/it eventually finds a plant that Wall-E has been keeping, and that plant is whisked away into the ship. But cute, funny, innocent Wall-E has fallen in love with Eve. He is worried about her safety, and tags along, grabbing hold of the giant space ship. What we find when we reach our destination is all of humanity, floating around in space with machines to do everything for them. They all live in floating recliners, growing too fat to move on their own (because there is never any need). In an ironic twist, Wall-E is like a divine messenger sent to remind the humans of their humanity. Indeed, Wall-E has more humanity in him than do the humans themselves.
Everyone has heard the message before: "We consume too much, we need to conserve. We are killing our planet." And that message is finally starting to take hold. The repetition and continued rejection of this idea by our culture (and myself, for that matter) reminds me of a joke about a new Preacher in town. He got up one day, preached an excellent sermon, and the congregants congratulated him on such a great job. The very next week he took the pulpit and preached the exact same sermon. The crown was thinking "that was odd." This went on for several more weeks, until one day when a woman came up to the Preacher and said "Preacher, we think you are great, your sermon was excellent as always, but it has been the same sermon for six straight weeks. Can't you do anything else?" To which the Preacher replied "I have plenty more sermons, and will preach them just as soon as we all put this on into practice." We have all heard about conservation over and over again. And we all know that our consumption mentality is unhealthy and out of control. So when are we going to actually change? When are we going to treat Earth as God's beautiful creation, as a gift entrusted to us. We are its stewards, not its masters. When are we going to be content with what we have, instead of constantly wanting more and more, gluttons of money/things/etc? I believe are headed down the right road, both we as a human race and we as Christians. But we have only taken a few small steps. Let us continue to be reminded of these truths, that we might actually live them out some day.
Wall-E impresses the viewer on so many levels. Not only does it tell an exciting and original science-fiction story, it impresses truths on our hearts, dazzles the eyes and the ears, and makes us laugh quite often along the way. What a feat for a film with hardly any dialogue at all. Its profundity can be seen in small ways, such as a scene (left) in which Wall-E picks up a jewelery box with a diamond ring in it, tosses the ring away, and is fascinated by the hinge on the box. Oh how we store up treasures on this earth! Pixar does it time and time again. This is truly an original film that creates awe and wonder in its viewers, both young and old. I have come to expect nothing less than absolutely incredible films from the group of people that continue to turn out the greatest animated films of all-time.
5 comments:
I cried a lot in Wall-E, I am embarrassed to say..............it was one of the best, most touching love stories I have ever seen.
this was a good one. i love the part where wall-E shows Eve when he can do by compacting some trash then spitting it out in a box. "ta daaaa!"
Ty and I just watched this on a long drive home from the mountains. It was cute. I went in expecting there to be no human/ words. Beeping did get a little annoying. And let's face it, all these fancy new children/family movies will never rank up to The Lion King or The Little Mermaid, but still, vey cute.
Kip- forgot my google thing.
Wal-E was very cute i thought. I ended up seeing it because the person i was with couldn't sneak into pineapple express.
Anyway i thought Wal-E was a good movie and like you said it was the message we hear over and over again but never really take as a fact. One part you didn't mention was about how everything in the movie was a product of one company. sort of showing how a company can become too wealthy, too strong, too powerfull, and that a country cannot survive without it. One reason why 08's bail outs were so hated. Companies should simply die off but instead are too woven into our economy it wouldn't survive without it.
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