Reviews: Wall-E

Robots are a tricky subject for many people. Especially in the context of our fiction they have been most commonly represented by violently murdering automatons that go about their business of edging out humanity.

Metaphorically then, they have come to represent the demonization of the working class, the rising up of the slaves and a continuation of the capitalist narrative: the revolt of the working class. Even more though is the idea that the capitalist machine will finally turn on its masters, that the replacement of labor will finally do as people would and revolt.

Far more revolutionary than this confrontational and tired narrative sits Wall-E, the stubby cube-shaped trash compactor that goes about his business as the last remaining robot on earth. By day he wanders endless heaps of trash left behind by a hyper consumerist culture that destroyed the earth and leaving it uninhabitable for human existence. By night, he retreats back to his humble abode in the shell of a larger version of himself where he stores a miniature menagerie of knick-nacks he salvages amongst the endless piles of junk he compacts into miniature squares.

The first 30 minutes of this film are the most profound, the most endearing, and the most revolutionary of any scene depicted in recent years. The stark and brutal depiction of a ruined manhattan, nouvelle skylines constructed out of towering piles of trash cubes, is gritty, fantastic, and utterly brutal in its silent condemnation of the humans of the past that brought about its genesis. On this palette the little robot Wall-E wanders with a sort of unaware bliss, scavenging parts for his own benefit from the shattered husks of his brethren. His introduction - humming in his own mechanical tunes the opening notes to "Put on your Sunday Clothes" from Hello Dolly - forms a humanistic contrast to the depressing starkness that informs his environment. Instantly he becomes our primary focus, our vehicle into this world, even as an inanimate object.

Later details reinforce this association, Wall-E rummages through infinite piles of garbage, picking out odd trinkets that catch his attention with the particularity of a human perusing the goodwill bins near his house. And when he returns to his humble abode, shelving his belongings and turning on a recording of Hello Dolly, we are all but committed to connecting emotionally with this robot.

This is revolutionary. A silent coup of epic scale if ever there was one. Through expressions, particularities of behavior and sparse sounds the animators at Pixar have undermined the very inherentness of humanity. The primary argumentative vehicle of those opposed to sentient robots is the innateness of humanity to humans. The primacy and uniqueness of compassion and empathy to the human experience. For the most part this is a narrative continued and reiterated by robot narratives. Wall-E spins this on its head.

* TO BE CONTINUED LATER *