Written by Madison Challis ; edited by Lily Tighe
One of the most powerful environmental films of our time does not star David Attenborough or Greenpeace activists, but a Hello Dolly-loving, rubbish-sorting robot whose best friend is a cockroach. What’s not to love?
Although we may still live on Earth, the 2008 film WALL-E portrays a dystopia uncanny to our present-day.
The film depicts an Earth decreed unliveable due to climate change. The last living humans are incapacitated space tourists, who communicate solely via technology, overconsume at the touch of a button and rely on meal replacement smoothies for sustenance.
There are unsettling similarities between much of our current reality and the Pixar Animation Studios film WALL-E. With extreme weather conditions rising in frequency (what was once every 10 years, we are seeing natural disasters occur every 3); the rise of instantaneous validation through companies like Amazon; and since COVID-19 communication (once necessarily, now for convenience) is all virtual.
WALL-E follows the story of a robot named WALL-E whose job is to condense rubbish left on Earth by humans. WALL-E falls in love with EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), another robot, whose mission is to find proof that Earth is liveable - for example by finding a plant or soil. WALL-E finds himself on a space-explorative adventure. His whole aim in the film is purely to please EVA and ultimately hold her hand – yet all the while he saves humanity by bringing them hope via a plant found living on Earth.
You may think that WALL-E is a love story about two robots, and while you would be correct, the resounding message is that of the drawbacks of consumption, mass production and the addiction to technology. The writer and director of WALL-E, Andrew Stanton, said on the topic ‘I usually enjoy being right, but not in this instance[…] I didn’t want to be right on so many things in this movie’.
When the film was released it was described as an ‘environmentalist parable’ so often that Stanton felt the need to renounce the label. ‘I don’t have a political bent or ecological message to push,’ Stanton told New York magazine. ‘I don't mind that it supports that kind of view — it’s certainly a good-citizen kind of way to be — but everything I wanted to do was based on the film’s love story, the last robot on Earth, the sentence that we first came up with in 1994.’ Whether or not he ‘meant’ it to be an environmental tale is irrelevant, and of course Pixar/ the Walt Disney Company have to say that they have no political agenda (not that the environment should be seen as political. But alas – here we are!).
In the film, the ship on which the humans have escaped is wholly owned by ‘Buy’n’Large’ and operated by the same company that ran Earth into the ground. The company bears a strong resemblance to Amazon, the company that was inspiration to Staton even 15 years ago. This paints a striking picture of the harmful effects of letting two things continue unchecked: a society’s voracious need to consume (cheap products, entertainment, food, resources), and private industry’s ambition for profit, overtaking public good.
The screens the ship’s tenants are provided with are so engrossing that although they are surrounded by other humans on other chairs with other screens, they never actually look up and see one another. Instead, the screens are portals to their entire reality. This is looking like are not-so-far-off future with everything becoming digital via the Metaverse, where you can just create your own realities, play games, collect/ sell NFTs and sit and live in your world virtually. For now you need to be connected to a headset and be sat down, but the best tech wizards are of course currently working hard to make it more usable by all for our day-to-day lives.
Amidst this, there is a visual bliss of sorts when WALL-E and EVE dance around the stars together. It gives us a moment of smallness and is a reminder of how inspirational the transcendence of space is.
The overarching message is that we need to connect more with our local community, live our lives away from our computers and TV’s as much as we can, and look after nature. We should prioritise living locally in the sense of the food and products we buy – shop independent when you can, whether that’s down to your clothes, your home décor or your food! Take a wonder around your local village, town, city, look up from your phone and you will find the culture that you so (likely) yearn for. If we respect the land we have – the relationship with it can be fruitful.
WALL-E’s vision of the future is a cautionary dystopia encompassed in an amusing, skilfully-made children’s film; its first 40 minutes are effectively wordless, a triumph of contemporary silent filmmaking. Yet while we’re gazing at the animated solar system, we can’t help but imagine the world that gave rise to the films rubbish-strewn wasteland and its middle-upper-class humans’ breakdown into weak, formless flesh blobs who’ve lost the ability to create, think, or have real relationships. Futuristic science fiction is at its best when it makes us take a hard look at our own world.
Let us end on a fun fact, and proof that WALL-E is linked more closely to our reality than we realise:
The ship humanity resides in is called Axiom - those of you who are avid space enthusiasts or Elon Musk fans may recognise that name. The company SpaceX’s April 8 launch shipped three tourists to the International Space Station for a 12-day trip and was called ‘Axiom Mission 1’, and I don’t believe that anything Musk does happens by accident or coincidence.
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