What I Learned From WALL-E: Michael Crawford Survives!

WALL-E was an absolutely adorable movie- which is a rave from me if the film is animated. WALL-E the character was charming and sweet, demonstrating more wit, intelligence, and personality than the people in the film. The story was deceptively deep, with dark implications about the future of the human race and the sad state of our current existence. But what was the most important thing that I took from the movie? That even in a post-apocalyptic world, music and the arts are still influential.

WALL-E, in his cute little one-room apartment that he made for himself and shares with a cockroach and little trinkets from centuries gone by, passes his time after a hard day's work by watching Hello Dolly! Not the iconic "Before the Parade Passes By," though. The movie opens with WALL-E compacting garbage and listening to "Put On Your Sunday Clothes," which he watches and listens to several times during the movie. But later, he watches Michael Crawford sing "It Only Takes A Moment," which is my personal favorite Dolly so I was glad to hear it. WALL-E watches Michael Crawford take Marianne McAndrew's hand, and you see him yearn for someone, yearn for connection, yearn not to be so unnaturally alone on the planet. Later, when EVE, the decidedly female object of WALL-E's affection, watches the tape, she realizes how she feels and how WALL-E feels about her (in this film, artificial intelligence allows for feelings). It's cute, it's sweet, and it has implications that a music person like me cannot ignore!

Technology is not portrayed as a friend to man in this film, despite the fact that the main character is a robot. Technology has made mankind so lazy that they don't even walk around or sit up- they have hover-chairs that carry them around and little robots who run around and get stuff for them. They have perpetual TV in front of them and no awareness of anything that is actually happening. But WALL-E...he clings to the one surviving bit of music that he has. It inspires him to reach out to EVE, it inspires EVE to ignore her directive and connect to WALL-E, it (among other Earth things) inspires the captain of the ship to take action regarding the earth's condition. In the end, when life and beauty and all things recognizable had left the earth, music still remained, and that music still had the power to influence. As my mom commented as we were leaving the theatre, "they're called the humanities, after all." When everything else left behind by humanity looked like dirty, dead piles of garbage, the music was still beautiful and still held the most precious of human ideals.

Since Michael Crawford's voice (in The Phantom of the Opera) was such an inspirational force in my life, it made me very happy to see that the creators of this film thought he could stand the test of time as well. I very nearly teared up when WALL-E watched him sing and made his little metal fingers interlock. I thought, "yeah, me too, WALL-E. ME too. He has that effect on everyone."