Wall-E

Looking eerily like Johnny 5 of Short Circuit fame, WALL-E is an industrious robot still working at a task he was assigned over 700 years ago to clean up the Earth which had been abandoned to the huge piles of trash the consuming society had left on it. He spends his days crushing small cubes of trash and then constructed elaborate buildings of trash. Occasionally he finds some piece of discarded rubbish that he sees value in and he has gathered these items in his domicile where he spends his nights and rides out dust storms. His only companion is a cockroach that follows him about.

One day WALL-E is present at the arrival of a space craft that launches an egg shaped robot called EVE. EVE is searching for something and as the fascinated WALL-E follows her, slowly the form a bond. When EVE accomplishes her mission she returns to space and a love struck WALL-E follows her. This opens us to a world of humans who live their entire lives on ships being fed nutrients and having their lives catered to. The movie follows WALL-E as he attempts to find EVE again and eventually in a plot to save humanity.

That is the hopefully spoiler free summary which doesn't quite manage to get across the charm of the film. WALL-E is more human than robot in most ways but there is a quaintness in the notion of a robot in love and the ability of the animators to articulate this is quite impressive. The story isn't all that complicated and is filled with plenty of homages such as an evil HALesque looking red eye that is the ship's auto pilot. I wasn't really laughing that much but I tend to be a bitter old man type when it comes to comedy and the audience around me seemed to be enjoying themselves. I enjoyed the narrative (just didn't laugh that much). The inevitable messages about pollution and consumer society are there and biting but not so heavy handed that you become irritated.

I did from time to time fall out of the story to think about robots that think for themselves and wondered if that were really a good thing. Occasionally I wondered why a robot would do A or B. But those were brief and usually I preferred to tell my mind to shut up and enjoy the film. And that I did.