Well, either the audience fell asleep ~really~ quickly or they were caught up. I didn’t hear any snoring, either.

To Zigory:

I found the ending optimistic, especially if you watch the ending credits and see the Earth coming back to life, the rivers and plants restored. But, you’re right, kids who watch this on DVD without adult input might miss the message, especially preschoolers.

To a child, the sense of a system and society that is dependable and rational is extremely important to his feeling secure and optimistic, to his feeling free and motivated to learn and grow and become ambitious within that society.

The new Disney-Pixar movie Wall E is not at all in the spirit of Walt Disney’s movies.

Above all, the problem with this film — and the fact that busy parents, or their child care providers, will one day buy the DVD and play it over and over for their children without watching it — is the message that the universe makes no sense and the future is dark and adults are incapable of dealing with their problems until long past catastrophe. This is not a reassuring message to children who love life and can’t wait to grow up and flourish. It is harmful.

As my 5-year-old son said, “That’s a Garbage Planet. That’s not Earth. Why are they calling it Earth?” He understands that Earth makes sense. People are rational beings.

I explained it’s a make-believe silly story about Earth in the future where, as my wife said, “people become stupid” and can’t get rid of garbage. (Even though they can create a spaceship to hold and feed the entire human population for 700 years). I reassured him and his sister that it’s ridiculous and that this is not going to happen in real life.

Caught up, or asleep.

During the climax the theater, which included several small children, was ABSOLUTELY SILENT–a sign that we were all caught up in the moment, from seniors to youngsters. That’s not an easy thing to do!

Sounds like welfare junkies under an Democratic government. Which would make the film a cautionary conservative tale.

The fundamental story is “the last robot on Earth finds love and adventure”; how he becomes that last robot on Earth and how that adventure is driven is of no importance: WALL*E could have been the last archaeology robot sent to find the Maltese Falcon statue–the story structure would have remained exactly the same, right down to the arrival of EVE and their return to the mother ship, and the adventure that follows.

The fact that environmentalism is used as a driving–both otherwise meaningless–plot device is quickly revealed when you start asking questions about the movie’s structure: is consumerism bad? WALL*E, a product of that consumerism, finds value in collecting treasures–consumer products–in the piles of trash. And the trash itself: if humanity is so advanced they can launch people into space, couldn’t they just launch the trash into space instead?

WALL*E is not Happy Feet: there is no coming together of characters questioning the evils of consumerism and a promise to do better. There is no lecture; the MacGuffin drives a bunch of rather funny images during the third act, but there is no moral value assigned to those images. And yes, I saw the film–and despite having an extremely low tolerance for environmental lectures and environmental hypocrites, I did not feel lectured at in any way.

You know, if you are nominally a film critic, you’d think you’d know a MacGuffin when one hits you in the face. Sadly, it appears Kyle Smith doesn’t know what a MacGuffin is–which makes me question his effectiveness as a film critic.

Much easier to pin commercialism run amuck on a Big-Time corporate boogy-man, than call capitalism into question for producing “too much” garbage for the planet, and creating lazy do-nothing consumers!

Whatever…all these comments have given me a great “perspective” to see this movie by. I can only hope, like most of you seem to think here, that the TRUE story line comes through…”all the garbage”!