The moment I saw the theatrical trailer for Pixar’s WALL-E I couldn’t wait to see it. I was just so thrilled. I’ve always loved cute metal robots with human feelings. There was something about the rather rickety and rusty robot that was so emotionally appealing, something that strongly pulled and strummed at my heartstrings and told me I just had to watch it. So I did. I watched WALL-E the other day when it premiered in local cinemas, standing in line along with other pesky children my age. After waiting months to see it (the last movie I saw in theaters was the equally brilliant and moving Kung Fu Panda) I’m glad I wasn’t disappointed.
Perhaps because of excitement I woke up early that day (something I didn’t really intend but happened anyway) and met up with the good friends I left at the company I worked for until two weeks ago. We ate oriental (and quite expensive) brunch at an old but still decently popular Chinese restaurant and looked around the shops at the nearby bazaar. They still worked on grave yard shifts, the poor things, so they soon unanimously agreed to abandon me and leave me to watch the movie on my own. Fine. I’m getting used to doing many things alone these days anyway.
When I got to the mall (crowded, as usual) I still had some time left before the movie so I strolled around a bit, helplessly bought some graphic tee shirts (again), opened a new bank account to try and set aside and save some of what little that remained of my savings, and sent money to an online shop I ordered a shirt from the day before. I was beginning to feel miserable again. Soon I met up with my other friends (who only agreed to watch the movie because I’d been trying to convince them for so long) and we went to see the movie.
The movie is about WALL-E, an innocent, inquisitive, amusing, but hopelessly obsolete waste disposal robot that’s the only one of his kind left after centuries of working to clean up the mess humans left lying all around on earth. For most of his life he has been alone, cleaning up, collecting and neatly stacking up the garbage on an eerily silent planet. All alone. All he had was an adorable and (resilient) little cockroach for a loyal pet and a container van full of beautiful garbage to go home to at the end of his long day. As he goes about collecting trash everyday, he picks up things he finds interesting, bringing them home and wringing whatever little droplets of happiness he could get from them. Somehow, his longing for company, his desperation to escape the loneliness that envelopes his world like the mountains of trash, comes out once he is home, inspecting and staring at his collection, and watching old videos of happy people singing and holding hands and sharing the joys of togetherness with each other. For a long time, that is how things are for him. And then all of a sudden, one fine day, another being comes along, a sleek and sophisticated robot called EVE who searches for signs of life in the uninhabited earth WALL-E cleans everyday. His life begins to change.
Sometimes we forget what we have and how important they really are to us. We don’t realize it before they are taken from us, before we are stripped of all we’ve taken for granted. The movie reminded me how terrible a life it is to live without friends, without family, without love, without the many, many blessings we have but often forget to be thankful for. Every now and then it pains me that in life, in this very short life, there is so much separation. Living the kind of life we live nowadays, we simply can’t help but drift apart, unconsciously floating away from most things we hold dear. We’re often forced, ripped apart from everything we try hardest to keep, to cling onto. We often find ourselves separated from things we wish we could forever be with, finding comfort in the familiar togetherness of friends and family. I don’t show it often as I wasn’t raised that way, and I know it’s wrong to seek to become whole and complete through others. And yet I also can’t deny that seeing the threads of my ties and bonds with these people slowly unraveling is a bit of a heartache. I feel a dull pain deep in my heart. And I don’t think it’s just angina. We’re often told that in this life people will come and go. But that doesn’t ease the pain. Like characters in some elaborate story, they enter the scene, play their part, and exit whenever the storyteller pleases. And yet, in the end, the characters’ demise, no matter how expected, still manages to upset us in some way. I guess the challenge then is how to find, and keep, relationships that help us become altogether better people.
The movie was just fantastic. The animation was perfect, the characters were absolutely adorable, and the plot simple yet succulent with valuable realizations. It was both an ominous reminder of the importance of ecological preservation and an endearingly warm love story set in the bleak future. Grown-ups should go see animated cartoon movies more often. It’s a bit sad to say but really, I think we all sometimes feel that way, alone and abandoned in this big planet, quietly living our lives in our own little impenetrable bubbles, that we, at some point or another, inevitably begin to feel detached and distant and separated from everything and everyone around us.
We live our lives in stoic loneliness despite the millions of other people around us, as if we were living alone on a cold, deserted planet. We fill up our houses with things we don’t really need but feel good about having, finding some twisted form of friendship with clothes and gadgets and furniture and everything else that’s unfortunately too inanimate to reciprocate our gestures of friendship, hoping to replace the companionship of the people we’ve lost touch with with the material things we drown ourselves in. Then there really are times when the desire to connect with each other and the longing for companionship simply becomes too strong to fight off and ignore, times when we feel all alone and yearning for something, someone, to come along and change things. I guess that is what life is about, finding and realizing you have found whatever it is that completes you. We all need somebody, someone to fill the gaps in our existence and ultimately complete us. A big part of life is about figuring out who or what can complete us, and finding that missing piece to create our own masterpiece. Like most cartoon movies, it had a happy ending. But it left poignant lessons in its wake as well. I’m so glad I went to see that movie.
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