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The Dartmouth
July 16, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Pixar's 'WALL-E'charms, disturbs

Courtesy of HousingCake
Courtesy of HousingCake

"WALL-E" is an undeniably charming film. Created by Pixar and directed by the company's fixture Andrew Stanton, the feature is -- as we've come to expect from the makers of "Toy Story" (1995) and "Finding Nemo" (2003) -- a cross-generational, computer-generated classic. Like the Pixar pictures of yesteryear, "WALL-E" is both cute and clever; but unlike its carefree predecessors, this film has political aspirations.

"WALL-E" is set on the post-apocalyptic Earth of 2700. A conglomerate corporation called "Buy N' Large" (read: Wal-Mart) has conquered the world through contentment, providing the populace with any thing and every thing they desire. But Buy N' Large has since gotten too large for the earth's britches and has fled for outer space aboard an intergalactic party-boat known as the Axiom -- leaving our planet a toxic mess unfit for life.

Between the hazy spires of sky-scrapers and trash heaps that once might have been New York City, we are introduced to Wall-E ("Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class"), one of the robots left behind to clean up the mess. By the first of many miracles of the film, Wall-E is somehow still "alive" despite his long-past obsolescence.

Wall-E spends his days scuttling back and forth between the trash piles, collecting noteworthy relics of human existence -- including a fork, a spoon, a spork and an incessantly playing video of the forgettable musical "Hello Dolly!" from 1969. In his dumpster home-turned-shrine, Wall-E pines silently for the human concept of companionship -- in the 1989 version of this tale, Ariel belts "Part of Your World" from her cave of collectibles.

Thanks to its environmentalist and apocalyptic smoke and mirrors, "WALL-E" has escaped the ire of the fairytale genre. But the film owes as much to Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" (1959) as it does to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968).

When a reconnaissance probe oh-so-cleverly named EVE appears on earth, the tale as old as time is set in motion once more. This go-round, however, true love's kiss occurs between a toaster oven and an iPod -- Wall-E is a lowly suitor to the graceful and intimidating Eve. The power of love to overcome incompatible circuitry was truly touching, but mostly made me feel inadequate for failing to drag a date to the movies.

What is truly disturbing about "WALL-E," though is not its unrealistic expectations of love -- but its aesthetic. The most clever scene in the film is the closing credits, where the animators display the ease with which a computer can recreate the entire history of Western art, from cave paintings (with beasts exchanged for robots) to Van Gogh. The human race in "WALL-E" has evolved into a group of obese slobs, unable to even walk -- while outside the spaceship, Wall-E and Eve cavort gracefully in anti-gravity, dancing a breathtaking robo-waltz before the flickering galaxies.

In his Times op-ed, Frank Rich notes that, on his trip to see the film, the children in the audience "clapped their small hands" at its conclusion.

"What they applauded," Rich writes, "was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out."

This is not at all the case. "WALL-E" sets a fairytale in dystopia; it remakes an aesthetic, not the world. The critics hailing "WALL-E" as the cultural touchstone of this year's campaign season should be wary. Thanks to Bill Clinton, "fairytale" is now a derogatory term, but it's one that this film undoubtedly deserves.