Posted by
JP on Monday, July 07, 2008 9:23:34 AM
by Marc T. Newman [media reviewer/critic]
The
Earth has become an enormous refuse heap. Toiling tirelessly amid the
rubble is a little anthropomorphic trash compactor named WALL-E. With a
cockroach as his only companion, WALL-E has been humming along for
hundreds of years, cubing and stacking the endless sea of stuff that
humans have used up and thrown away. The dust storms that arise from
time to time seem bent on choking out whatever remains of life on this
bleak, once-blue planet. Such a barren, post-apocalyptic world hardly
seems to be a fertile setting for romance.
Living
in an antiseptic culture of quick “hook-ups’ and failed relationships,
you would think that people would have built up resistance to the
allure of real romance. But we have not. Despite the long odds of
success – or perhaps because of them – we value real love. And while we
often despair of ever finding it ourselves, we still yearn for the
possibility. So even in a bleak world like WALL-E’s, we hope that love
can bloom.
Fortunately,
love – the people at Pixar remind us – is more concerned with character
than with circumstances. Properly established and nourished, love can
grow anywhere. [more]