This is a cartoon that offers an uncompromising, imaginative, angry portrait of the future. So that’s one robot, a cockroach and a vision of earth gone to pot. His only company is a lonesome cockroach. He lives in a cluttered container and spends his days buzzing about, piling up junk to look like skyscrapers or Mayan temples and sucking up sun for his solar panels. The only animate object left in the lifeless, rust-coloured, dusty landscape of urban desolation that we used to call earth is one tireless mechanical waste-collector called Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class). But everything that comes before is magical. The only humans left live a sterile, bloated life high above earth, where we decamp for the second, more frenetic and less inspired half of the film. Plus ça change: from Cruella de Vil to our fellow folk in ‘Happy Feet’, cartoons have always held a mirror up to our selfish instincts.This time it’s 2700, and we’ve polluted ourselves out of existence. When we do, finally, encounter humans – living on a self-sufficient spaceship, waited on by robots, sucking on straws – they’re fat, sedentary, greedy and unpleasant. For ‘Wall-E’, humans again take a back seat, and it’s a robot with a cube for a belly and binoculars for eyes who’s bleeping for our love. In Pixar’s previous film, ‘Ratatouille’, it was a sewer rat who brilliantly grabbed our attention and revolutionised French cuisine. Pixar has drawn inspiration for this bold, bleak and often very beautiful film from the worst approximations of the future we’re shaping for our planet. It’s part of the bargain: we draw them, they make us look stupid.Īnd so it is with ‘Wall-E’, except this time we have only ourselves to blame. We upright, two-legged creatures regularly have to give way to the superior intelligence or endless fascination of a deer or a dog or a penguin. Humans land a raw deal when it comes to animations.
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