WALL-E is a fun movie for all ages made by Pixar Animation Studios in 2008 about a seemingly lifeless planet Earth in the 29th century. Humanity had fled the planet and left behind robots named “WALL-E” to clean up the mess that was made as a result of human consumerism. Eventually, plant life was detected on Earth, which prompted the return of humans to return and re-establish life on Earth as it once had long ago.
The movie follows one particular WALL-E robot as it falls in love with a life-detection robot named EVE. But for the purposes of ecology, one notable point is that the setting in the beginning of the movie makes one thing clear: Earth had been made barren due to unsustainable human practices and lifestyles as seen from the piles of garbage, some of which being taller than high, downtown office buildings in the core of the city.
The color used for this setting also adds to the severity of the barren landscape in that it is mostly brown. Not a dark and fertile brown however, but rather a light and sandy brown you can see being blown around that shows just how eroded the surface had become. There are plant species in reality that could possibly scrape by in such an environment, but the chance is made worse if you consider that the piles of waste and garbage had polluted and reduced the already poor nutrient content in the soil.
Overall, it’s a fun movie you can watch several times to pick up on different themes you may have missed on previous viewings. It displays a rather extreme scenario of consumerism and the result of a neglected environment, but it can still be a very real possibility if we do nothing to restore or even mitigate the damage already done to our own home planet.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 