WALL-E

i never really owned any barbie dolls (okay, just one but it was after all the pre-teen fad died down and the minute it was paid for and removed from its packaging, i came to appreciate why mum despised it), but i grew up playing LEGO with my brothers. while my brothers constructed spiffy LEGO-machines and fighter planes, i was happy creating my boxy dream cottages... until of course we were all fighting for the same piece for our muse. nonetheless, i've always been fascinated with robots. i remember the remote controlled toy cars my brothers got at one time... or the LEGO technic my brother upgraded himself to. then there was STAR WARS that my uncle taped when they aired it on telly and i was fascinated by R2-D2 and C3-PO but only because to a 3 year old, Yoda was scary looking and spoke strangely... well, i still think R2-D2 is the best, what with the gadgets and intelligence with which it was programmed? who wouldn't want it as a companion?!! =) think of all the things you could do with a R2-D2; explore unchartered territories, get into unauthorized places, find unclassified info. ... hide a light saber... use it as a personal mobil ?!?! the possibilities are nearly endless.

so it was with little coaxing that i needed to go watch the new animation movie of a Waste Allocation Load Lifter-- Earth-class (WALL-E), a new release from Pixar. there is some resemblance of WALL-E in its appearance to ET; the very large tear-shaped eye-lobes encasing the round binoculars. the difference of course is that WALL-E is a little robot; it compacts trash and piles them into compacted trash structures sky-scraper high with its preprogrammed role to "clean up Earth one trash-cube at a time". it has been doing this for 700 years since humans fled their trash infested earth to travel in the AXIOM to live in space, where they might enjoy the ultimate luxury of their lives... until their earth is cleaned up...

story writers ANDREW STANTON and PETE DOCTER have created a cast of wiz-bots with personality that evolved as glitches during their prolonged activity... and the plot they've woven is one that exalts the wonderful human creations, the beauty of the natural world, as well as the awe and fascination in curious inquiry, while abasing the waste, redundancy, the unquestioning short-sightedness that is germane to the problems of ecological sustainability today. it is amusing to find that each little bot has a concrete 'directive' or purpose built into their 'being' while humans' purpose in life is portrayed as ominously lured by the said promises of consumerism, an abstract construct. you meet a beautiful and sophisticated earth probe named EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), an obsessive-compulsive M-O (Microbe Obliterator), and their apparently 'flawed in-design' friends as you follow WALL-E's adventures into space and back. while it does not offer concrete answers, but perhaps a glimpse of what future machines might be like. this is an animation movie that would very likely appeal to those who ponder about 'will-power', 'cognition', or about artificial-intelligence's ability to evolve and learn, whether they are capable of emotions and store associations and memories like we do. it will also offer those who have fought with their own compy-quirks, battled with dying mother-boards, random-access and/or hard-disk memory, etc. some good laughs. as for me, i loved every pixel and sound-lolling-byte it offered! do go watch the movie before you head to wikipedia's spoiler... it's one movie that will probably become a classic!

**UPDATE: an interview recording of Andrew Stanton on npr.org today (10th July 2008).