Wall-E World

I am putting you on notice, David Fincher and Brad Pitt. Your The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which opens Dec. 25) had better be pretty good, really good, to nudge ahead of this Pixar movie in the Oscar derby. Our review was in line with every other review this summer, which is to say: great. Everyone loved Wall-E. I'm sure Brad Pitt's and David Fincher's kids love Wall-E. The families of studio executives and Oscar voters likely all feel the same way. And yet, is it possible to underestimate an animated fable that is already so beloved?

Released this week on DVD (in more flavors and with more extras than I'm willing to list, Blu-ray included), the G-rated, $232 million-grossing Wall-E goes even beyond the Toy Story movies in appealing to the precious dual demographic of parents and kids. Not only does it feature an adorably clunky, solitary robot (an amalgam of R2-D2 and a Rubik's Cube), but it references--and possibly surpasses--every favorite sci-fi movie of the baby boom, from 2001 through Star Wars. (The 1972 Silent Running, in which a lone human tends plants in space, assisted by droids, is a particularly clear influence.)

And if the rusted, dented, nostalgic Wall-E (the character) is a non-verbal figure from silent movies, his beloved Eve represents the future. (This in a movie already set some 700 years in the future.) She's Lillian Gish as iPod: white, rounded, smoothed out like a salt shaker powered by atomic energy and equipped with laser blasters. She's a probe dispatched to Earth to see if anything green or living is left down there. He's a humble trash compactor whose best (i.e. only) friend is a cockroach. Can you see where this is going?

On his feature commentary, Oscar-winning director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) says of the movie's cautionary eco-warning, "I didn't have that kind of agenda." And yet, the working title for the project, which sat on the shelf for a dozen years, was Trash Planet, he says.

Trashed Planet is more like it. After the film's largely human-free first half, it emerges how we homo sapiens polluted and destroyed Earth, then took refuge in an orbiting arc suspiciously resembling Aaron Spelling's old Love Boat (with captain Fred Willard hooting "stay the course!"), where we've devolved into portly, pampered Botero figures of infantile laziness and dependency. (And, yes, our computer overlord is a lot like 2001's HAL.) If Wall-E, on his lovestruck quest to find Eve, is a liberator (even a savior), it's by accident. He's a comical sentinel, the last of his kind. As Stanton says: obsolete without knowing it, no one to repair him, his programming and code forgotten, a one-bot repair shop whose only client is himself.

But Wall-E isn't scolding or ultimately bleak. We future fatties are to blame for our fate (and Earth's), but our robotic avatar doesn't do all the work for us. There is hope for humanity in the film, and not just from the sole surviving VHS copy of Hello, Dolly. If time, or aging, runs backward for the protagonist of Benjamin Button, the future in Wall-E cascades toward us: From the ruins, there is rebirth.

Wall-E. Walt Disney Home Ent., $39.99.