WORDS Jen Vuk

Animated films like WALL-E aren’t just fun for kids. They also have something to teach us about life.

A  solitary robot wanders across an eerie, barren landscape rounding up detritus left behind by the long-gone human race.

No, it’s not a scene from Will Smith’s 2004 I, Robot or even from the sci-fi classic Blade Runner; it’s the startling opening of the futuristic adventure WALL-E, released to great acclaim in Australian cinemas last year.

WALL-E has everything we’ve come to expect from a kid’s flick: some action, a little G-rated romance and a bit of a wimpy ending, but it also pushes the envelope on far-more grown-up themes—from frank references to films such as Kubrick’s 2001 and Spielberg’s A.I., to topical, even burning, issues.

‘In presenting a world so utterly devoid of life, evidently the result of war, disease, climate change, or some other cataclysmic event, the situation is even grimmer than I Am Legend’, writes US critic Peter Howell at www.thestar.com.‘WALL-E is Al Gore’s worst-case global warming nightmare made real.’

This was a big step for a little animation. Such a scenario seemed light years from Walt Disney’s technicolour world, but could it be that life down at Looney Tunes’ studios wasn’t as two-dimensional as we’d always thought?

I mean, didn’t Mickey Mouse and his dog Pluto teach us a thing or two about loyalty all those years back? And wasn’t it the quintessential underdog … err … duck, Donald, who showed us that being a loser wasn’t the same as being a quitter?

From Wile E. Coyote to Wallace and Gromit, you’ll find eternal opportunism, often in the face of endless opposition. Likewise, the individual’s struggle for a) acceptance, b) understanding, c) love, d) all of the above, is echoed in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and the adorable Finding Nemo, to name a few. The times may have changed, but the message remains pretty much the same, albeit in a thoroughly modern CGI package.

Enter Shrek, with its classic one-liners, adult comedy and killer soundtrack. The award-winning 2001 film was funny, topical and irreverent, but what sealed the deal was the way it wrangled its way into our hearts.

By the time the eponymous ‘hero’ discovers he’s not quite the fearsome monster he’d always made himself out to be, there’s been a shift in us, too. We are suddenly softer around the edges, more tempered in our scepticism. Could something so profound really have happened while we were taken for a joy ride by a fast-talking donkey?

‘If you do not say anything in a cartoon you might as well not draw it at all’, the late US cartoonist Charles Shultz, creator of Peanuts, once wrote. ‘Humour, which does not say anything, is worthless humour. So I contend that a cartoonist must be given a chance to do his own preaching.’

WALL-E doesn’t limit itself to lofty universal themes, either. The film’s unlikely ‘preacher’ is a small, silent, studious android who, while left to ‘live’ out his days clearing away rubbish, stumbles upon another robot (the biblically named EVE) sent to earth on a secret mission.

Curiosity makes way for something deeper and more urgent. This little android soon has us in the palm of his rusty hand. WALL-E isn’t an exercise in anthropomorphism as much as an all-out emotional assault. In a film largely devoid of humans we look to a machine to elicit feeling and empathy—and, boy, does he … um … it deliver.

Good animation—not unlike children—delights, charms and disarms in equal measure. It provokes in us simple joys and profound sadness, but now and then it takes us further. As WALL-E’s sophisticated and beautifully drawn apocalyptic vision illustrates, there’s no reason why an animation that pulls at the heartstrings can’t also have a dig at our conscience.

WALL-E was released on DVD last month.

Comment  on this article