Sweet, funny movies that entertain seem to bang on some people’s last nerve. Why is that? I think, these ‘times’ we live in, not unfamiliar to any age really, are different from historical times in that we do have a special edge—huge leaps in technology. For fifty years, media has ramped up to a rather sophisticated level. This state of affairs may be typical of the future, or not, depending on how successfully we utilize techno gadgets, engineering breakthroughs, or how we respond to real barriers to continued life on our planet and increased population pressures.

We are the first era to need solutions to problems most of us find tedious, and often lack the education to even be in the discussion. We can only agree to allocate funds for those with the interest and education to suss out the various answers. We must also hope their explanations are deeply engrossing as we attempt to decide if they are on the right track. Ideally, we will all figure it out before we are knee deep in our own stuff we manufacture that does not adhere to the ‘dust to dust’ rule.

When in LA visiting friends, one mentioned he thought Wall-E was a bit too heavy-handed with its messages. I heard that echo through the entire viewing of this little movie about a computerized garbage compacter ‘living alone’ 7 centuries in the future, on our planet littered with more refuse than space or landfills. Was I thinking about the real world piles at our local landfill? Sorta. More, it seemed an amusing depiction of a possible future—admittedly absolutely the mildest ever of the post-apocalyptic films I’ve watched. I am one of the glass half-full of potable water kinda people.

The world has been predicted as ‘coming to an end’ since the first fireside storytellers realized the quality of impact on their listeners of this particular scenario. The World coming to an end trumps getting eaten by a lion in the thrills category. So, dastardly ends for Mother Earth have played well to audiences since there was such a thing (say a few hundred thousand years, if not a few million).

If we’re talking shear terror, Mad Max ‘gladiators’ or Waterworld ‘smokers’ scare me much more than the future in Wall-E. Yes, these futuristic citizens may simply hit a nerve, the lazy, addict nerve we all pretend we don’t have. Should that be the case, maybe we can derive an inspirational message for the kids in there somewhere amidst the slams on sedentary lifestyles, super-size meals and our childlike tendency to enjoy being coddled.

Wall-E had some interesting firsts such as live-action, which was about lighting the ‘set’ as if it were an action film, and a load of characters voiced by one dude, Ben Burrt, with his computer synthesized variants perfected in sound design work on the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises. He also designed quite a bit of Wall-E’s ambient sounds in a junkyard.

The naming of the characters and technology is clever enough to know they spent a few bull sessions going there: thinking up acronyms for the Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-class and his girlfriend Eve, the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator and M-O, the Microbe Obliterator; making sure we recognize the first space debris, the 1957 Russian satellite Sputnik; naming the ship Axiom, a nerd term for taking something for granted.

Disney and Pixar are still leading the pack in animations we want to pay to see on the big screen. Notably, the i-Pod still working for Wall-E is well beyond homage to Steve Jobs, or product placement for Apple.

The computer graphics were top-notch, as was the voice match and props chosen to allow these characters to be endearing. They playfully built an animated robot that is extra-ordinar-E. Some of the technology jokes are genuinely magical. Making sense out of any culture’s refuse is the archaeologist’s challenge on a dig. The filmmakers are naturals—if they weren’t in front of their computers, they could be in the field, discerning lifestyles from mysterious artifacts like carved wooden cats peering down stacks of books.

42 year old Director Andrew Stanton was on board as a writer in the Toy Story franchise, and continued through the years as a writer or animator or producer or co-director, or all of the above, with A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo (he also voiced the incredibly laid-back Crush) and Ratatouille. The guy does funny. He collaborates well with co-writer Pete Docter, present on some of these other projects as well. The other writer, Jim Reardon, left The Simpson’s to step up to the big time.

Anyway you smash this story into little cubes of comments, the story is engaging, the characters have real charisma and chemistry, and that helps when we run up against the ‘movie time limit, and must accept the hurried climax and closure. Everyone with whom I was with at this viewing laughed at the end, and slowly admitted they thought it was…sweet. Yup.