Wall-E Is Not the Movie You Think It Is
It's subversive in all the right ways.
Wall-E, Pixar’s masterpiece from 2008, is often celebrated or dismissed as environmentalist propaganda. This misconception is understandable. The film pummels the audience from the opening credits with a cartoonish version of human waste, prodigality, and corporate excess. Towers of trash have replaced skyscrapers and the earth is bereft of all life except for robots and cockroaches.
If you asked a 6-year-old what the earth would look like if adults kept littering, he might draw a similar picture.
For anyone not among Gaia’s faithful idolaters, the whole thing feels like you’re about to be scolded by your third-grade teacher for exhaling too much carbon dioxide, so I can forgive viewers who roll their eyes at the premise. Mankind is ruining the earth. We get it. I thought I was watching a fun kid’s movie about a robot, not signing up for a lecture about how I need to recycle.
But the theme of the movie isn’t “humanity has ruined the earth, so you should feel bad and do better.” While humanity has indeed ruined the earth and left behind robots to clean it up, that is not the movie’s final word. It’s just the initial premise.
The theme of the movie is much bolder and more subversive. It flips our expectations in the best way possible. After you read this, you’ll never look at Wall-E the same way again.
Unlocking Wall-E’s Theme
There is one key scene that unlocks the entire movie. Near the middle of the film, the captain of the Axiom is admiring the tiny plant brought back from Earth. He has just done the equivalent of a 3-hour Wikipedia deep dive on the planet, researching and dreaming, because he has no knowledge of the place, and certainly has no memory of it.
As he looks at the seedling, a tiny leaf falls off. The Captain panics. He rushes to take care of the seedling, giving it some water.
"You came a long way for a drink of water,” he says. “Just needed someone to look after you, that's all...” Then he looks at the globe on the screen and has a realization.
“We have to go back,” he says. The seedling and the Earth need Man to take care of them.
This scene is the hinge of the narrative. The captain, who has nothing to do all day, has discovered something important. He has a home. He also surfaces the theme of the movie.
Mankind has failed in its mission and then abandoned that mission.
This little twist, focusing on the mission, makes all the difference. Contrary to most environmentalist propaganda, Wall-E does not treat man as a scourge or a virus to be controlled and eradicated through population control. Instead, man is the steward of creation. He belongs on Earth.
The typical trope in sci-fi stories, especially more modern ones, is to have humanity leave a ruined earth and ascend to the stars. Or to leave behind our planet before we ruin it. To survive, mankind must spread out and find new homes. For the benefit of both the planet, which has limited resources, and the human species, which must collectively make itself harder to kill, we must conquer the stars. The great adventure is out there somewhere. The final frontier, if you will.
Wall-E reverses this.
Mankind has fallen. What seems to be an ascension to the stars is actually exile. And they need to find their way back. The rest of the movie makes this clear while contrasting humanity with the robots who serve them.
Purpose, Beauty, and Meaning
Every robot in Wall-E has a purpose. A meaningful one. Other than the Captain of the Axiom, who has the modern equivalent of a fake email job, no human has a purpose other than mindless consumption and entertainment. Robots and humans are constantly compared and contrasted.
Mankind made robots in their image, but the robots must help their wayward creators reclaim their purpose. However, Wall-E takes another turn when it shows us that finding purpose won’t be enough.
From the very beginning, we are shown that purpose isn't enough. Wall-E, our main protagonist, is dedicated to his purpose of cleaning up the planet…but he also appreciates beauty.
And it is this appreciation that has allowed him to outlast all of the other robots. He is the last robot functioning on Earth, and his continued operation is not an accident or coincidence. His curiosity and love of trinkets power his mission just as much as the sun powers his battery.
He has hobbies. He likes collecting things. He loves music. He even has a pet. Overall, he finds life fascinating.
Wall-E is not a utilitarian pragmatist, clocking in and clocking out with rote predictability, focused only on his job. By not hyper-focusing on his job, he can do his job better. His appreciation of beauty in the small, everyday things he finds lying in the trash is what allows him to better fulfill his purpose.
Even more importantly, Wall-E’s appreciation of life and beauty allows him to break out of a rigid interpretation of his purpose so he can see the purpose behind the purpose. Or, to put it differently, he can see the weightier matters of the law.
It’s not just Wall-E. All of the good robots in the movie are able to break out of their rigid programming. But not to rebel.
The good robots break out of their rigid programming to better achieve their purposes. They mature. They become more like the childish Wall-E and, as a result, grow up.
This contrasts with AUTO, the bad robot of the film, who wants to keep humanity in perpetual exile, safe and babied for all eternity.
AUTO cannot see the bigger picture. In his quest to fulfill his purpose, AUTO would doom humanity to decay and death. If you've seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, you'll recognize the callback in his design. AUTO's actions end up endangering many of the humans, including babies.
Looking at our other protagonist, Eve, clarifies this point. Near the beginning, Eve is released from her ship, turned on, and immediately gets to work searching for plant life on Earth. As soon as the ship flies away, however, she watches to make sure it is gone, like a cubicle worker pretending to work until his boss disappears around the corner.
Then she cuts loose.
She starts flying around for the pure joy of it. No other reason. It seems Eve, too, appreciates beauty. Up until this moment, Wall-E is only curious. But after she starts skimming through the skies, Wall-E falls in love. He recognizes a kindred spirit.
One more example. Wall-E liberates a bunch of sick and malfunctioning robots. One grooming robot seems only suitable for dolling up clowns. A buffing robot wants to use his arms to box instead of clean. A vacuuming robot can only cough up dirt instead of sucking it up. None of them work right. They all seem to have forgotten their purpose.
But that’s not what the movie believes.
After these robots are liberated, they start singing, mimicking the song Wall-E has recorded. They, too, appreciate beauty. And while they seem to have forgotten their everyday purpose, they end up fulfilling their greater purpose: to help humanity get home.
Wall-E leads them in keeping the more weightier matters of the law.
Exile and Restoration
If you hadn’t noticed, Wall-E is an Adam and Eve story. It is about a new beginning. A new creation. It slaps us in the face with this fact by literally naming one of the main characters “Eve.” It has all the subtlety of a flashing neon sign on a dark, quiet street.
Eve means “mother of all the living,” and there is even a sequence where Eve stops a sliding tram from crushing a bunch of babies. The movie is not shy about what it is doing.
Wall-E and Eve are more human than anyone in exile on the Axiom. And instead of a Fall corrupting all of creation, a sacrifice ensures the rest of humanity can return to the promised land. We even get a resurrection scene.
Our new Adam and Eve lead mankind back to the Garden, where a new tree of life is planted. Wall-E is all about the restoration of the proper order of things. It is about establishing mankind’s stewardship over the earth.
The closing credits hammer this home by enacting the entire history of art, from cave drawings to impressionism to 8-bit sprites. The last image shows our Adam and Eve looking at a new tree of life, the original sapling that is now grown.
Never skip the closing credits when you watch this movie. They are the final few paragraphs of a masterpiece.
Embodied Life
The hopeful vision of the future Wall-E portrays is a return to the land, hands in the dirt, muscles aching with effort, man carving out a living by the sweat of his brow. The solution is not to escape hard work but to lean into it with a specific purpose. We don’t seek to escape our bodies, as if they were prisons, but use them to forge the future. Not a future for its own sake and not a future where survival is the greatest virtue, but a future infused with true beauty.
And now, the robots are not nannies and nursemaids for grown adults but partners in purpose. The ground is still cursed, but the curse has been softened with faithful help and connection and friendship and love. It is our ground. It is our home. We were meant to be rooted here.
Far from being a film about the environmental scourge of humanity on the earth, Wall-E is one of the most pro-human films ever made. We were created for a purpose, and the earth was created for us to rule.
And so we should rule it well. Not as tyrants or corporate CEOs but as benevolent kings. Tolkien once said through Gandalf, “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer.” And the kings of the earth have a lot of healing to do.
Wall-E should inspire us to claim the mantle of our purpose while not being single-minded in that purpose. To appreciate beauty. To stop and smell the roses, much like Wall-E stopped to touch the stars or dance with his crush in the cold beauty of space.
Appreciate the craftsmanship of a fork, the resiliency of a cactus in the desert, and the simple touch of another hand to yours. Because without beauty, our purposes might as well be vapor and ash. They will come to nothing, or they will become a curse to others.
1000% agreed. Wall-E is one of the best animated movies of the last 25 years, and it has powerful themes (not the least of which is portraying a beautiful metaphor for sacrificial love and commitment).
"Without a vision, the people perish."