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You don't have to go too far below the not-so-overly-cute surface of Pixar's new WALL-E to see a pretty grim future, albeit 700 years from now, on Earth. If you haven't seen the movie I won't spoil it for you too much by revealing WALL-E is a robot. WALL-E is a robot assigned the singular task of collecting, compacting, and neatly piling endless heaps of trash in a kind of Pixar version of post apocalypse. Humans have left Earth to live in the more favorable conditions of a luxury cruise ship-like space ship. WALLE-E lives on Earth virtually alone, but with the company of a somehow cute cockroach. Ah, Pixar: How do you do it? While this is all very bleak and everything, we could say that, without maybe knowing it, the makers of WALL-E have stumbled upon their alter ecos.
There's nothing like an impossibly watchable, massively appealing movie like WALL-E (spoiler: amazing first half much better than not-amazing second half) to make so clear to a wide audience what really is at stake if the way we live doesn't change or, in some cases, continue to change for the better. There's too much trash. We all know that. If we continue to find new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle, (as Adrian and the gang do throughout Episode 3 of Alter Eco) not only can we avoid turning into the scary, not-quite-comical obese, sluggish humans of WALL-E's imagined intergalactic future, we might also have a shot at continuing to foster life on Earth, even greatly improve our quality of life on Earth and, call me heartless, put WALL-E out of work.
This post was inspired by Alter Eco.
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