By now, millions of people have seen Wall-E, the astounding new film from Disney/Pixar. If you haven’t seen it yet, then you might not want to read this post. We don’t give away too many particulars, but the film is so surprising, novel, and full of heart that you might want to walk into it as a completely blank slate.

If you have seen it, then chances are you’ve also heard people’s reactions—everything from “OMG best movie ever” to “They are brainwashing our children!” Great works of art have a tendency to polarize people, and I doubt that anyone can walk out of Wall-E unmoved.

There have been many eloquent words written online about the film. Stephen Simon of the Spiritual Cinema Circle says that it is “staggering, visionary” with “no filmic antecedent.” In his New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled “Wall-E for President,” Frank Rich calls the film a “gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.”

Several of us here at The Sunny Way were moved by the movie as well and discussed it over email. Here is an edited version of what Wall-E elicited in us.

Megan: Watching the first third of Wall-E, I fell a little in love with him—his penchant for sappy musicals, his categorizing of all the interesting junk he found while doing his job, and his loneliness and longing for a friend. When Eve arrived and he developed a crush on her, things just got funnier and sweeter. I barely even noticed the absence of humans, except when majestically-framed shots of towers of trash reminded me of them.

When they got to the Axiom, though, and humans finally entered the picture, well, at that point, I leaned over to my friend and whispered “This is the saddest movie I’ve ever seen.” Seeing the vigor and creativity of humanity stuck immobile on hovering chaises, enshrouded in all-encompassing display screens ... it just hit a bit close to home for me, I think.

My sister-in-law saw the film, too, and told me later that the enormous humans on their hovering chaises drinking meals from giant cups made her feel bad, as she looked down at her own physique (larger than ideal, like mine) and sipped her soda from a giant cup. The humans on the ship are just exaggerated versions of where so many of us are today, but honestly? They are not exaggerated by much. It’s just present reality taken all the way to its logical end.
Then, of course, a series of events starts to change things…

Uli: You brought out a lot of great points about this film! To me too the beginning was excruciatingly sad - garbage and more garbage wherever you looked, the burning sun, the abandoned earth - and this sweet little robot applying his own system of what is valuable to our left-overs, tossing out a diamond ring and keeping the flip-open box it came in for his stash of memorabilia. It really put things in perspective!

It was the first time I watched a film like this without being irritated by the inevitable love story and human sentimentality applied to other creatures - maybe because the life-positive and urgent message was by far the strongest point of the film. The mirror Wall-E is holding up to the culture is quite ruthless and it keeps the film from being sugary. At times, I found myself holding my breath - was this really a Walt Disney movie I was watching? We’ve come quite a long way!

Anatole: I love the lack of cynicism—the film is unashamedly innocent. In fact no character had a bad motive, just some were more stuck than others. I also like that the humans were not bitter, just deluded, mediated, and seriously not self reliant. But it was not their fault, as they did not have any other model to work on. And as soon as they could, as soon as they saw there was something more to life, they abandoned their excesses and started a more self reliant life style.

And of course Wall-e was like a child. I know the film was meant to appeal to children but it also appealed to the inner child in me and I think adults in general. Of course its easy to just dismiss this as naive and silly, but I think this film pushes us to look at ourselves and our own cynical worldview.

Megan: I really like what you say here, Anatole, about none of the characters having an evil motive, about them just being “stuck.” This is a pretty optimistic point of view, and probably why the film feels so sweet when it could easily be depressing. To me, this goes back to what we talked about last week in our articles on science fiction. This film is dystopian, but thankfully it doesn’t stop there—it goes on to how humans recover from dystopia.

The thing that I found most unrealistic, ironically, was the fact that, in Wall-E’s universe, all it takes is the tiniest little nudge to wake the people up from their stupor and reconnect them with their humanity. I was so glad that they finally did become humans again, instead of lounging consumption machines, but I admit to feeling a little scared that a tiny nudge might not cut it in the real world. So many of us are still ignoring the obvious messages that we have to change. We don’t often focus on this here on The Sunny Way, but the fact remains.

To me this is the most interesting part of what we are doing on this site and, more broadly, in the world—the exploration into what does it take to change a mind? To change a culture? Expressions like Wall-E are leading the way into answering those questions, for sure.

(image by [177] via flickr)