Centuries from now, the world stews in the mounds of garbage and pollution left behind by the human race. Littering the roadways we also find derelict Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class robots (WALL-Es), which were supposed to clean up the mess for us.

One survives. He continues the good fight, replacing his own broken parts with those he finds on his broken-down brethren. Over the centuries, he has developed a quirky personality. He's built a home in a garbage bin, and filled it with found items for which he finds practical uses and aesthetic value. He watches old VHS tapes. Hello, Dolly!¹ has become his favorite, speaking as it does of love and a life about which he can only dream. He experiences a brief moment of cognitive dissonance when he discovers the spork he's found doesn't really fit with either the spoons or the forks. He also keeps a clever cockroach as a pet-- a G-movie convention that doesn't really hurt the film, but adds only little.²

The first quarter of the film moves at a casual pace and features few recognizable words. It's a kind of storytelling sadly lacking in contemporary family films, and it has been done very well here. If visual poetry can be found in a planet-wide dump, Pixar has found it.

Then a ship arrives, bringing with it EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a sophisticated robot sent by the human race, who lounge around in space, waiting for their eventual return to earth. After the kind of distrust found in, say, old musicals, the two 'bots fall in love. Their nascent relationship stalls when WALL-E offers EVE his rarest treasure, a living plant. She takes the item and lapses into a kind of coma. The ability of the film to communicate WALL-E's devotion and sadness as he waits for her to awake is an animated achievement. This could have been a short feature on its own, though it would have left a lot of sad viewers and sold few tie-in toys.³

Of course, there's a reason for EVE's state, and both robots soon find themselves aboard the AXIOM, where the remnants of the human race live a life both high-speed and sedentary.

The film's humans provide us with some excellent bits of satire. They're overweight, pampered, generally useless, hedonistic, trend-obsessed, and so plugged into their personal media they remain unaware of the world around them. In short, they resemble more than a little the film's audience.

At this point, WALL-E's pace picks up, the slapstick increases, and story turns conventional. We have a clear objective, setbacks and twists, heroes, villains, and characters who must make choices. The principal villain will be very familiar to fans of Science Fiction. Like a lot of SF WALL-E is political: surprisingly political for a family film, distributed by the sort of corporation it frequently mocks. Its messages about environmentalism, personal responsibility, individuality, and companionship, while not at all subtle, don't feel forced. They grow naturally from the tale WALL-E has to tell.

In the end, we have a very odd G-rated film with a high-tech setting but an old-fashioned approach: tell a story about characters and entertain an audience, and provide fodder for thought along the way.

Accompanying WALL-E is a Pixar short film, "Presto!" This cartoon features the studio's recognizable computer animation, but it hearkens back to the old Warner Brothers 'toons. It's funny, raucous yet innocent, and like the feature, generates maximum laughs from a clever premise. It even features a trickster rabbit.

WALL-E
Director: Andrew Stanton
Writers: Andrew Stanton, Jim Capobianco

Ben Burt as WALL-E
Elissa Knight as EVE
Jeff Garlin as the Captain
Fred Willard as Shelby Forthright
John Ratzenberger as John
Kathy Najimy as Mary
Sigourney Weaver as the ship's computer

1. Of all the up-beat musicals with a love story, why Hello, Dolly? I don't know, but I can proffer several answers. As one of the last old-fashioned Hollywood musicals, it holds some historical significance. It's instantly recognizable as an old-fashioned Hollywood musical, even to people who have never seen it. It takes place in the era before the First World War, during the great age of belief in technology. Its title song can be sung as, "Hello, WALL-E." Most obscurely, it already has a connection to post-apocalyptic settings; sets from the 1969 film were cannibalized and used in the post-apocalyptic scenes for Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Finally, the director/co-writer, Andrew Stanton, had appeared in a high school production of the musical years earlier. When he was going through possible songs to use, he recalled one of his favorite numbers from the famous Jerry Herman musical. The rest was future history.

2. The Custodian notes the "presence of the cockroach and its favorite food" could "be a shoutout to the trope 'cockroaches and twinkies will survive us.'"

3. Such a tale would recall (a little) Elizabeth Bear's "Tideline," which has been nominated for the 2008 Hugo Award. Although they differ in many ways, "Tideline" and WALL-E resemble each other enough that the appearance of the story and film in the same year represents an interesting bit of synchronicity.

WALL-E as a homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey

Somewhere near the middle of the Wall-E movie, audience members — those above a certain age — are reminded of the classic 1968 movie by Stanley Kubrick.

Spoilers below. This gives away major plot points. If you don't want to know what happens in WALL-E, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, then it's probably best not to read on.

Although there are references in the early part of Wall-E, the first overt hints appear when we meet the control computer, named Auto. Auto is introduced as a dim red light behind a small, darkened plexiglass hemisphere.

While that might trigger a subliminal memory, the realisation hits us full in the face, when we notice that Auto has sabotaged Eve's efforts to bring back a green plant from the planet earth. In theory, once the plant has been found, it should trigger a return to Earth for the whole Axiom ship and its cargo of humanity.

This sabotage happens because Auto has a higher command, unknown to the human cargo and the human crew. The presence of the plant brings the crew's desires and specific instructions into conflict with the higher mission.

Auto therefore has no option but to over-rule its human master and begin a sequence of events designed to eliminate all trace of the plant and its bearers from the Axiom ship.

This, of course, is the essence of the 2001 movie: computers are all very well, but be careful how you program them.

In Kubrick's classic, the conflict happens because the crew is unaware of Hal's real mission, which is to find the sentinel/monolith/black rectangle, whereas the crew think they are only on a mission to Jupiter. Hal 9000 resolves this first by killing the hibernating crew members and then by falsifying a malfunction and after the active crew goes out to fix it, prevents them from re-entering the main ship.

Kubrick's lesson — and to a lesser extent that of Wall-E — is that it is important to ensure that programming is clear, with no ambiguous or conflicting instructions which might lead to unforeseen outcomes. In both cases, the computer recognises the conflict between instructions and in each case, decides the conflict can only be resolved by eliminating the human problem. In 2001, Dave Bowman 'kills' the computer by removing its memory banks. Nothing so final is required in Wall-E, but the human commander utimately has to wrest control from the computer.

Auto is not quite as sinister, or as murderous as the Hal 9000 series computer, but for a kids' movie, she's quite scary enough. The voice of Auto is provided by Macintosh Macintalk. Sigourney Weaver did the 'PA Announcement' voice for the Axiom, but Auto itself had a purely robotic voice ('Macintalk' is credited on IMDB). Thanks to The Custodian for that. I had Weaver as voicing Auto. Oops!

The nods to 2001 continue with the music (Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube) and finally, with a space-dancing routine. Kubrick has a small ship docking with a space station to the Blue Danube, while the dance between Wall-E and Eve is one of the more touching moments of the more recent movie.

Some have equated the limited dialog in Wall-E to a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin movie from the silent era. I think the reference there is much more to Kubrick's masterly direction of 2001. Kubrick developed the sinister character of Hal through very limited dialog, and told his story through huge scenes and wonderful sets. Equally, it is one of the triumphs of Wall-E that the story is perfectly clear, even with the limited dialog. The two main characters end up as thoroughly developed, yet neither of them says anything more than his or her name.

From a production point of view, there is almost no dialogue in the early scenes of Wall-E, and dialog is sparse throughout. The same is true of 2001. The first scenes of Space Odyssey — with the apes — are entirely dialog-free. Similarly, Wall-E has no-one to talk to in his lonely vigil on earth, so we hear some dialog in the recordings of the Hello Dolly sequences, but apart from that, no dialog at all. As each movie progresses into space, the dialog is kept to a minimum both in Kubrick's epic and in this more modern movie.

This kind of referencing is no coincidence. In an interview at Pixar in June 2008, director Andrew Stanton said he aimed to create something in the spirit of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and space-western Outland.

Other similarities between the two include one of the main characters taking a ride in a pod, which is intended to be fatal. Another is the fact that human characters are not well developed, while machine characters get better treatment. I also think the colour palettes and tones of the two movies are similar, the spaceships are both high-key white. There are other similarities, but I'll leave you, gentle reader, to discover them for yourself.

Interestingly, Eve was apparently designed by the iPod designer, Jonathan Ive.

Sources, further information