Don’t tell me how good WALL-E is. I’ve heard. I’ve been hearing. Don’t tell me it’s top tier Pixar, perhaps the GOAT from the studio. Not interested. Don’t tell me it’s both bleak and heartwarming, and confronts the destructive path of humankind with bravery and grace, a work of animated art everyone should watch. It’s still a “no” from me. I refuse.
Just kidding. I adore WALL-E. I saw it in the theater the week it came out, and the little robot’s story resonated deeply with my life situation at the time. I own the DVD and return to it every few years, finding new joys in each re-watch. It’d be my favorite Pixar if it wasn’t for a certain chef rat. The above paragraph was my attempt at inhabiting my sister-in-law’s consciousness. For the 15 long years that WALL-E has existed, this has been her mindset. My sister-in-law refuses to watch WALL-E, no matter how many times I try to convince her.
It’s never added up. She loves Pixar movies. She’s a dedicated environmentalist and advocate for climate justice. Her name is Eve. Okay, no it’s not. But the rest is true and seems to mean she’d gravitate toward WALL-E, instead of away. I finally have to know why. Is there something beyond youngest-child obstinacy? What lies at the dark heart of this refusal?
On a scale of 1-10, how annoying have I been about this subject over the past 15 years?
10. I think that every time someone has brought up space, or robots, or trash, or pollution, or the environment, or walls, or the letter “e” (what is this movie even about?! Nevermind, don’t want to know), you’ve asked me if I have seen or will watch WALL-E. I haven’t. I won’t.
Let me set the scene. It’s 2008. Early Summer. You’re 15 years old. We’re in a strange liminal space at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. Obama and Clinton are vying for the democratic nomination. Something awful has happened to you: I have just married into your family. WALL-E drops and I’m at one of the first screenings in our hometown. You are not. Weeks pass. What led you to initially deprive yourself of this life-affirming cinematic elixir?
I don’t know why I never saw it at first. I remember seeing ads for it. I don’t remember being particularly interested in it. The only scene I remember from a trailer is a vacuum looking guy floating around space, I think. Eh. I don’t remember if anyone suggested going to see it and I said no. I don’t think so. I think the opportunity just never arose, and that’s fine.
Your sister remembers things differently: Many times, when it was in theaters, she and other members of your family suggested going, and you refused then. Your reasoning was apparently that a friend told you it was boring. Does that ring a bell? Do you think that friend has since changed her tune about the movie? I bet she’s tatted up with full-sleeves of WALL-E by now. I’ll still never forgive her.
Hm. That’s interesting. I don’t remember it that way at all. In my mind, I was never invited to see it and then it just became a thing of never wanting to see it later on. But maybe I did hear it was boring and was kind of scared of seeing it (à la your brother and The Sound of Music1). I do assume it’s a boring movie, so maybe that’s right, but I don’t remember that at all. Either way, I highly doubt anyone I would have associated with would get a WALL-E tattoo. Nobody wants to send out that signal to the world!
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Will you describe (in as much detail as you can) the plot of WALL-E, as you imagine it?
I think it’s a movie about a robot. I feel pretty confident about that part. Everything else I feel much less confident about. I think the robot lives in space. I think there’s a big mound of trash floating through space ’cause humans have decided to put their trash in space and WALL-E (the robot’s name) is worried about the trash ’cause it’s coming towards his planet or where he floats around in space. And he has to do something about the trash. So he recycles it. All by himself. He floats around in space alone. He doesn’t have robot friends. Not sure how he recycles the trash in space. The moral of the story is don’t put your trash in space, and recycle your trash. If the mound of trash part is not accurate, that could be because I’m conflating it with when that mound of trash was floating through the ocean.
It still is! What’s the closest you’ve come to watching WALL-E?
I used to be a fourth-grade teacher. After state testing, there’s not much left to do towards the end of the year. During this part of the year, my kids would normally work for a little bit and then we’d celebrate being done with the state test and our work for the day by watching a movie. I’d give them three options of a movie to watch, write them on the board, and they’d put their heads down and vote by raising their hands, and I’d record the votes on the board. The way we would initially choose the movies is by scrolling through a website (projected from my computer onto the Smartboard) and picking three that students generally seemed excited about. This was a less democratic process but pretty manageable—often they would just want to watch the newest ones. Once we were scrolling through, and WALL-E happened to be on the part of the page I was projecting onto the Smartboard. I was worried because oh my god I have now spent so much of my life refusing to watch this and this can’t be how it all ends. If they pick it and I have to watch it I just won’t tell my family. But also I was not worried because it wasn’t super new and hopefully like me the kids knew it wasn’t a good movie. One kid did yell out, “WALL-E!” I pretended not to hear them and kept scrolling. I didn’t even give them a chance to vote on it.
You are famous—in our immediate family, and I assume to your friend group—for your commitment to bits. Is this a bit? A long-running, steadfast bit designed to torment me? Am I the astronaut on the left in the meme?
Not a bit. A lifestyle. It may have started as a bit but now it feels like it is critical to the core of my existence that I never watch WALL-E.
When I offered you a dollar per minute of viewing, you declined. Now that we’re having this conversation on record, will you watch WALL-E and share your thoughts for Tor.com’s readership, waiting with bated breath?
I’m worried nobody will see me as true to my word if I watch it. I think I would need a really compelling reason. And I can’t think of anything that would be compelling enough. Maybe like I go live on YouTube and everybody watches me and pays me a dollar per minute. But no, maybe not. I don’t think so. I think I would like to die having never watched WALL-E.
Henry Hoke is the author of five books, most recently the memoir Sticker from Bloomsbury. Open Throat, a novel, is forthcoming in 2023 from MCD/FSG and Picador. His work appears in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Triangle House, Carve, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He edits humor at The Offing, and lives in New York City.
[1]* When we were little, my brother was terrified of The Sound of Music and refused to watch it. One day Mom and I finally forced him. He screamed for the first few minutes, but calmed down as soon as Julie Andrews appeared. “This is a movie,” he said, at peace. “Yeah of course,” I said. “What did you think?” “I thought it was just the sound of music.”
I have a large friend who doesn’t like WALL-E because of its depiction of large people.
That’s so strange. I never felt a compulsion to watch it, but quite enjoyed it when I did see it. Not to the point I want to see it again, but it’s not a bad movie. Then again there are films and TV shows I’ll probably never watch, either because I have no interest in them or they are reputedly pretty dreadful. I’ll go to my grave avoiding Twilight for instance.
I love WALL-E, but a) I know I’m supposed to be horrified by the meaningless sedentary existence on a space cruise ship, but it’s always looked kind of awesome.
(And the dates given for each captain belie the idea that it’s even unhealthy. They may not look like sports models, but they live a long time.)
And b) even if they really want to leave the Axiom to reclaim their humanity, etc., going straight from pampered inactivity to subsistence farming (on a world that has demonstrably produced One. Plant.) doesn’t strike me as a very survivable outcome, even with helpful robots. There’s more agricultural expertise in a random Manhattan co-op (which will at least have people with houseplants) than there is on the entire Axiom.
Couldn’t get into it. Shut it off after the sound kicked in and never returned to it.
Wall-E is so cute! Hard to think anyone doesn’t like it.
@2 – I thought once about watching the Twilights, in a “so bad but cool train wreck” sort of way. But now I’m a paid author, so I have better things to do with my time.
Why I’ve never watched it: the description made it seem like the kind of story that no director could resist making putridly cloying.
I never liked Wall-E. As others have noted, the fat-shaming is awful and the end scenario is completely unsurvivable for the population of the Axiom. Moreover, the air was thick with irony in summer 2008 over this cautionary tale about mindless consumer trash, being promoted by vast seas of branded consumer products and cheap toys. There are scenes I like in the section set on Earth, and Wall-E and Eve are really cute robots, but I can’t stand the whole movie.
Would you tell your SIL that it’s Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a post-apocalyptic space opera? That’ll change her mind.
A lot of movies are Plato’s allegory — because movie theaters resemble the cave — but the other one that comes to mind as really pushing the comparison is Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Tell her that.
I never saw it as “fat shaming” but rather mindless runaway consumerist shaming. It just delivered the point so heavily, ahem, that Stalin or Khrushchev might’ve smiled about it. Strange to come from a Disney-owned studio of all places, but I still dug it.
Now if only Disney would pay attention to their own messages.
@10/FranklyFrank Okay, yes, it is mindless consumer shaming, but the creators choose to equate “mindless consumption” with “being fat and lazy.” Like, the thing about consumerism is that it’s insidious; it sells you on an identity, and then it sells you things based on that identity. And that identity can be something like “fitness maven” or “gymbro” or “kale-smoothie-drinking yoga lady” just as easily as it can be something that lets you eat big meals and take it easy all of the time. If anything, the whole keeping-up-with-the-Joneses “red is the new blue” herd mentality that the film satirizes feels outdated; like consumerism as practised in the 1950s. Even in 2008, consumerism had long since transitioned to selling you on the idea that you were being an Individual.
That said, I still love WALL-E.
@3 Your assumption would likely be correct. In reality (if that means anything within the context of a Pixar movie) the entire crew of the ship would have died out, even IF Earth were primed for maximum fertility.
In fact, that entire pictographic series in the style of art through the ages montage at the end during the credits while Peter Gabriel’s “Down to Earth” plays is BECAUSE OF that. After test screenings of the movie, the studio execs discovered that audiences just assumed, “And then they all died out,” was the implication. So they requested, and got, that series of paintings showing the humans thriving in their new home with the help of their robot friends.
I figured if the spaceship can feed them all now, it can keep feeding them until they learn agriculture.
#11. And they were right to do it, in my opinion. We’re not facing a fitness crisis in the Western world. So, I was happy to see someone point out, bluntly though it was, all this eating of junk food and companies getting us addicted — for profit — can lead us to a bad place, for our bodies and the planet. And as with the climate crisis, if the science is real, then it’s real. If you pollute your body, if you pollute a planet, it will have consequences. Science doesn’t care about our feelings or our economic concerns. Nor should it.
How can so many people say such words?! Wall-E is an absolute dream of a film and a true work of art, a great wakeup call for humanity. You simply must force her to watch the film and report back to us her view of it now. We would not think of it as her going back on her word however we would think of her as a hero.
I found the movie to be truly “meh” and have never watched it again. I generally adore and collect and re-watch Pixar films. But this one goes into the bin with all the “made for boy children” ones (Cars and its infinitude of sequels, the troll-boys one, and the fish-boys one — all of which except the first I’ve avoided). Some of the “made for girl children” ones are pretty cringey, too.
But I am also someone who has an identity-tied movie avoidance. Me, I’ve never seen Gone with the Wind. At first it was chance, but now I will hold to that in my remaining years (fewer ahead of me than behind me!)
(she/her) seems relevant here
It’s just not good. The pacing is off, the message is heavy handed and preachy, and the plot makes no sense.