You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

WALL-E can be called several things accurately, I think. On the surface it’s sci-fi, but ultimately (in my opinion) it’s really just a romantic comedy. If you’ve read many of my movie posts, you know that I have discovered a couple of basic rules for great romantic comedies, and all great romantic comedies follow at least one of them. So if WALL-E is a romantic comedy, the rule it follows is that the movie needs a strong secondary story – something that the movie is about besides the romance. The best example of this that I can think of is The American President, but WALL-E does this rather well, I think.

For those of you who either haven’t had a chance to see this or (tragically, in my opinion) have let the nay saying keep you from seeing it, here’s the gist of WALL-E:

It’s somewhere around 2800 AD. Trash has become so overwhelming that the humans have left on a luxury spaceliner to let the robots clean up. They were supposed to come back after five years, but it’s clear that there is no return in sight. We meet WALL-E, a charming trash-compacting robot who has a personality – kind of a design defect – and loves to collect the more interesting items he picks up throughout the day. WALL-E dutifully follows his routine, packrat tendencies aside, but the one thing he’s longing for is companionship. Sure, he has his cockroach buddy, but that’s more of a pet. He watches old video of Hello, Dolly! and dreams of being able to hold hands with someone like he sees in the movie.

As he’s going about his business, a huge spaceship lands and out comes EVE – a beautiful robot who looks for all the world like an Apple product. WALL-E is in love, but I think it’s more than the fact that she’s attractive and, you know, another being like him. Something that struck me about EVE in the second viewing was her little flight around after she lands. She checks a few items, like she’s been directed to do, and then she checks to make sure the spaceship is good and out of sight before taking a fly-around for fun. You get the impression that’s not something any other EVE robot does. And then there’s her rather remarkable temper, which is another part of the personality she’s not really supposed to have.

At any rate, WALL-E is in love at first sight, and does his best to impress her, and it works a little, but she has a job to do, and when she finally finds what she’s looking for, she involuntarily shuts down until the spacecraft that dropped her off comes back. WALL-E stows away and finds himself on the luxury space liner where all the humans have lived for the past 700 years.

And here’s where it gets hairy for some folks. A corporation that can most easily be compared to Wal-Mart appears to be running everything like a benevolent Big Brother. But all is not as it seems. Buy&Large is not an evil corporation and is never presented as one, in my view. They did what corporations do – respond to demand with supply. It’s just that people’s demand was for increasingly easier and easier lives, with complete disregard for anything else, including their bodies, their planet, and for all intents and purposes their free will.

It is this dependence on technology to do things for them that got them into the mess they’re in. People let the machines do everything for them, even to the point of thinking for them. And that brings about the major conflict in the climax. Take Mo, the little clean-up robot, for example. He is designed to clean things, but he can only travel along his little lighted white lined path. But once WALL-E strays off the path, Mo is faced with a dilemma – to stay on his path like he’s supposed to, or to break away from it to clean up the trail WALL-E is leaving. Mo chooses the latter, and when he leaves the path, a little alarm goes off but nothing more. You hear him say “I did it!” (sort of), and in that small but significant way he’s forever changed. And the lack of that independent impulse is what makes the “bad guys” bad. The Ship’s Auto-Pilot was given a “Directive” 700 years previously, and refuses to budge from that command, even when the circumstances have changed. And no, I don’t think it’s an accident that the words used to give that directive were “Stay the course.”

This movie does not hate fat people. I can’t believe I even have to type those words, but it seems that I do. The people on the Axiom are very fat indeed, but our sympathies are supposed to be with them, not our mockery. As someone who is, let's say, a little on the heavy side, I'm supersensitive to being laughed at, sometimes mistakenly, and I don't feel that at all with this movie and its portrayal of the people on the ship.  Generations and generations of humans before them let themselves become so dependent on having things made easier for them that they didn’t have to do anything for themselves, not even walk. I can't help wondering, at this point, how much obesity in our own world increased with the simple invention of the remote control, when people no longer had to get up and change the channels on their television sets.  They’re not even aware of their surroundings – most of them don’t even know there’s a pool onboard. I got rather choked up when first the captain then the other passengers stood up and took probably the first steps of their lives.

But like I said, this movie is essentially a romantic comedy about WALL-E and EVE, and the secondary story supports theirs. WALL-E was all alone on earth, except for his pet cockroach. He had no one to connect with, and it was all he wanted. Now, cut to the space ship, where all of the humans that exist are living together. But like WALL-E, they too are alone, even though they’re surrounded by people. They talk to people via the screens on their moving chairs, but they never talk face to face, and they never touch. I can’t help making a connection between WALL-E’s constantly shown desire to hold hands with another being and John and Mary’s hands accidentally but meaningfully touching.

What impressed me most about WALL-E as a character was not just his cuteness, although he has that in abundance. I love that his living quarters are jam-packed with cool contraptions from what used to be the planet earth. I was forcibly reminded of The Little Mermaid, where Ariel has collected all this stuff from the human world. WALL-E’s collection is of things he can’t bear to throw in with the rest of the garbage – things like Rubix cubes, spoons, lighters, and (*happy sigh*) movies. And this appreciation for the earth-that-was is strongly echoed in the Ship’s Captain, who can’t stop asking the Computer questions. Not to mention what is probably the greatest line in all of the movie – the Captain’s declaration of “I don’t want to survive; I want to LIVE.”

And ultimately, the difference between the almost-human WALL-E and the stone cold EVE is what the movie is all about. The difference between the complexity of being (or being like) a human with feelings and desires and being a machine with nothing but instructions and routine.

I don’t know if this movie better than The Incredibles. I hate ranking things like that, but I think I do like the “message” better in this one. I can’t get over the wonderful visuals and the absolute MAGIC of the sound design. That’s something a lot of people don’t pay attention to. I don’t either, but after reading several reviewers gushing about it, I thought I’d give it a little more of my attention the second time around. I don’t know a lot about sound design, but WALL-E is a real symphony and not just because of the musical score. All of the varied robot voice effects and the amazing, tiny detail sounds on earth. And perhaps the coolest effect of all – the little clicks of the cockroach walking.

Special props to whoever designed that amazing closing credits sequence. The movie ends with the humans starting over again, with the help of the robots, and it really is like civilization is being reborn. That’s why it’s SO COOL that the artwork and animation in the closing credits, with little snippets of WALL-E and EVE, are designed in evolving art styles from cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphics and mosaics to (dude, I almost jumped up and down when I saw this) Georges Seurat (tribute to Bathers, for the win!) and Vincent Van Gogh.

WALL-E is pretty much what you make of it.  If you're looking for a message, you'll probably find one.  If you're looking for a cute robot movie, you'll definitely find one.  If you're looking for a piece of fascist propaganda and feel as if you've found it with this film ... well, I just feel sorry for you.  I don't mean that to be dismissive at all; I just can't fathom the mindset that only sees negative where there's so much positive.