I caught WALL-E last Thursday, with a close friend. In all its layers of themes, it's presented in a very simple, understandable and delightful way.
The first, most obvious plot device is the love story between WALL-E and EVE. It's pretty much a love-at-first-sight, one-sided love affair at the start, with WALL-E having preconceived ideas about affection and love when EVE appeared in his mundane and lonely life as the last surviving mobile trash compactor on Earth. In short, EVE gave WALL-E a reason to strive for greater things.
In an ironic analogy, I'm perhaps currently feeling like how WALL-E did. But that's besides the point. WALL-E did what he could to try and impress EVE in ways both hidden and plainly obvious, with the latter not having much of an impact at all. In reality, I feel that this is usually the case. The unseen things can sometimes matter the most. However, the interaction between intention and action needs some equilibrium and restraint at times, given the circumstances.
Next is the idea about pollution, and saving the Earth. In the show, Earth has become a desolate wasteland, a giant landfill. This is slowly becoming a reality, till we individually take measures to slow the process down, and allow technology to reverse the flow of things.
And then we have the notion of human degeneracy and decadence. 700 years in the future, the humans on board the Axiom have all become rotund mockeries of our present frames, both physically and mentally. Being in space does cause gradual loss of bone mass, but it's hard to imagine that all of them did little to combat the fats aka exercise.
Related to that is their dependency on machines. Technology in the show has become so advanced that it governs every physical aspect of their lives, from getting around, to obtaining their daily needs. Everything has become as simple as a voice command. And therein lies the poison: The comfort has lulled them into a sense of complacency. People need to be put through the grinder to better themselves, and that holds true for every situation. When you stop doing something, you lose the ability to do it after some time. Just like how you need to practise on the piano or violin ever so often to at least maintain your aptitude at handling the instrument.
Since we're talking about machines, there's also the plot arc about sentient machines imposing their superiority on humans, a la The Matrix and I-Robot. Auto (the Axiom's main computer), determined that it had to follow some dumb directive, and the captain of the ship was powerless to stop the machine's actions. Auto eventually did things in a forceful manner to exercise control and dominance over the captain and the rest of the inhabitants of the ship. This perhaps is still a faraway dream, because artificial sentience hasn't been achieved yet, and I think it'll take many years of research to even come close to it.
A minor theme was the prevalence of the mass media to innoculate people with opinions about things. WALL-E got his perception of love from watching Hello, Dolly!. Similarly, many people nowadays have, bluntly speaking, watched too much TV and formed unrealistic and usually exaggerated concepts about many things. At the core of things though, the finer points still hold true. E.g., love is a mutual feeling, as shown in the musical. All around the remaining Earth and on the Axiom too, you can find loud billboards advertising the many Buy n Large products, enticing them to try things out.
In the technical sense, WALL-E was marvellous. Compared to the earlier CGI films, there has been such a monumental leap in depicting photorealistic scenes, and it sort of excites me to know that I'll (hopefully) be working on similar things in the future. But the path there is still riddled with many twists and turns, of course.
The first, most obvious plot device is the love story between WALL-E and EVE. It's pretty much a love-at-first-sight, one-sided love affair at the start, with WALL-E having preconceived ideas about affection and love when EVE appeared in his mundane and lonely life as the last surviving mobile trash compactor on Earth. In short, EVE gave WALL-E a reason to strive for greater things.
In an ironic analogy, I'm perhaps currently feeling like how WALL-E did. But that's besides the point. WALL-E did what he could to try and impress EVE in ways both hidden and plainly obvious, with the latter not having much of an impact at all. In reality, I feel that this is usually the case. The unseen things can sometimes matter the most. However, the interaction between intention and action needs some equilibrium and restraint at times, given the circumstances.
Next is the idea about pollution, and saving the Earth. In the show, Earth has become a desolate wasteland, a giant landfill. This is slowly becoming a reality, till we individually take measures to slow the process down, and allow technology to reverse the flow of things.
And then we have the notion of human degeneracy and decadence. 700 years in the future, the humans on board the Axiom have all become rotund mockeries of our present frames, both physically and mentally. Being in space does cause gradual loss of bone mass, but it's hard to imagine that all of them did little to combat the fats aka exercise.
Related to that is their dependency on machines. Technology in the show has become so advanced that it governs every physical aspect of their lives, from getting around, to obtaining their daily needs. Everything has become as simple as a voice command. And therein lies the poison: The comfort has lulled them into a sense of complacency. People need to be put through the grinder to better themselves, and that holds true for every situation. When you stop doing something, you lose the ability to do it after some time. Just like how you need to practise on the piano or violin ever so often to at least maintain your aptitude at handling the instrument.
Since we're talking about machines, there's also the plot arc about sentient machines imposing their superiority on humans, a la The Matrix and I-Robot. Auto (the Axiom's main computer), determined that it had to follow some dumb directive, and the captain of the ship was powerless to stop the machine's actions. Auto eventually did things in a forceful manner to exercise control and dominance over the captain and the rest of the inhabitants of the ship. This perhaps is still a faraway dream, because artificial sentience hasn't been achieved yet, and I think it'll take many years of research to even come close to it.
A minor theme was the prevalence of the mass media to innoculate people with opinions about things. WALL-E got his perception of love from watching Hello, Dolly!. Similarly, many people nowadays have, bluntly speaking, watched too much TV and formed unrealistic and usually exaggerated concepts about many things. At the core of things though, the finer points still hold true. E.g., love is a mutual feeling, as shown in the musical. All around the remaining Earth and on the Axiom too, you can find loud billboards advertising the many Buy n Large products, enticing them to try things out.
In the technical sense, WALL-E was marvellous. Compared to the earlier CGI films, there has been such a monumental leap in depicting photorealistic scenes, and it sort of excites me to know that I'll (hopefully) be working on similar things in the future. But the path there is still riddled with many twists and turns, of course.