this video is brought to you by mubi a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe get a whole month free at URL_TOKEN quality culture if you grew up at any point since the NUMBER_TOKENs you undoubtedly encounter children's stories centered around saving the planet and protecting nature with avatars for their crumbling environment ranging from cursed creatures in princess mononoke forest fairies and fern gully or more recently to fiti and moana although wally pixar's NUMBER_TOKEN sci-fi film about a lonely trash compacting robot hits similar eco-friendly beats its narrative distinctly and realistically puts forth a faceless foe in this whole quest for conservation the director insists he was only trying to tell a love story and not push an ecological message but wally's context and social commentary inevitably led to people drawing conclusions that go further than just the robots are cute don't get me wrong they definitely are but regardless of its intentions wali also became a story about the norm of prioritizing profit and consumption and the ways those principles manifest as complacency in larger society and sadly it's a film that's even more relevant now NUMBER_TOKEN plus years later so in this video i'm going to loosely use it as a blueprint to touch on some of the bigger discussions surrounding climate change and perhaps more significantly climate in action the film opens in a literal wasteland with a rusty old robot making its way through massive mounds of garbage we see wall-e performing the repetitive task owing to his name waste allocation load lifter earth class he compacts trash and stacks the resulting cubes into massive towers day after day year after year with only a cockroach as a companion side note this is one of my favorite disney animal sidekicks just the fact that most people have an innate disgust for roaches but they'd be the main survivor after all our bullsh so they had to make them cute for this movie somehow and i guess they couldn't use a rat because they'd already done ratatouille can y'all imagine bougie remy in a place like this anyway the point is earth is a trash heap now and it's the reason no one lives here anymore too much garbage in your face there's plenty of space out in space it's also plagued by extreme weather like sand storms and heat waves followed by torrential downpours wally has to scavenge the corpses of his fallen brethren for replacement parts just so he can keep functioning to what end i don't know because everything around him suggests the enormity and apparent impossibility of the task even the earth's orbit is inundated with space debris in short the planet's a mess this is where wally's setting can be simultaneously viewed as an exaggeration and an understatement an exaggeration because plastic pollution is only a tiny piece of the puzzle when it comes to real life concerns as david wallace wells notes in his book the uninhabitable earth plastic panic is another exemplary climate parable in that it is also a climate red herring the panic arises from the admirable desire to leave a smaller imprint on the planet and a natural horror that the environment is so polluted by detritus passing through
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