| 8+ Cautions: environmental confusion, some slang, and mild violence and intensity
WALL-E is the naïve but courageously devoted little robot that just happens to be the one to save a spaceship full of humans trying to get back to earth hundreds of years after their ancestors left the planet an apparently lifeless wreck. Centered around the main character’s childlike antics and ideas, WALL-E is a fun, enjoyable movie, though the setting may require an interpretive adjustment to be entirely sound.
2008 | Andrew Stanton | 98 min Watch Trailer
Environmental Confusion
While any environmental moral in WALL-E is kept within biblical boundaries, the story’s setting implies a state of things that is inconsistent with God’s promises. In WALL-E’s fictional future, the earth (turned into a barren junkyard by a hyperbolically consumeristic generation) has been unable to sustain life for several generations, while humankind has been surviving in a spaceship. The turning point comes when plant life is found growing on earth again. However, in reality, the Lord has promised that “while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest... shall not cease.”1 The movie can certainly be viewed with the idea that the periodic search missions to find plant life had simply missed parts of the earth where seedtime and harvest were continuing, or that the robot villain had hidden the fact of earth’s continuing sustainability from the humans, but taken at face value, the setting of a pretty-much destroyed earth is at best questionable.
Some Slang
By Golly
darn
heck
blasted
What the...
What the...
Mild Violence and Intensity
Scenes that might be too intense for young children typically involve robots rather than humans. A frightened WALL-E is trapped in flames, nearly blown up, pursued by evil robots, and crushed by machinery. A scene in which WALL-E is thought to be destroyed may be emotionally intense for young children. There are some peril scenes involving humans, but no one is actually hurt.
A positively-portrayed robot fires missiles in an overly-militant or frustrated manner, depending on the scene.
Note:
A few of the robots have emotions, and are obviously portrayed as characters demanding the viewer’s sympathy, despite the fact that they are not living beings.
An apparently “female” robot is very in-charge, militant, and at times condescending, while WALL-E, who finds “her” very attractive, is somewhat timid and naive, though ultimately more virtuous. A wall of portraits of previous spaceship captains includes a woman.
Human children on the spaceship live entirely separated from family by the totalitarian robots, and while the ending reunites the children with the other humans, they are not necessarily brought into family groups, but into a broad community.
Both robot and human couples hold hands. Two robots “kiss”. Two background songs reference kissing and holding someone close. There is a brief reference to “hologram dating”.
WALL-E finds a bra on a human-less earth, and can’t figure out what to do with it. The human characters wear tight space clothing, but this is far from being portrayed sensually.
A background song references cigars.
1 Genesis 8:22
