WALL-E – Watching It Again, Twenty Years Later

By Alexander Gordon

I was a child when WALL-E hit theaters. My parents bought the DVD; it played on loop in our Chevy Tahoe until the disc gave out. Rewatching it for the first time in maybe fifteen years, I expected nostalgia. I did not expect to feel diagnosed. 

Andrew Stanton’s 2008 Pixar film follows WALL-E, a small trash-compacting robot left behind on an abandoned Earth choked with garbage. He spends his days crushing cubes, collecting trinkets, and rewatching a worn VHS of Hello, Dolly!. When EVE arrives, a sleek probe sent to scan for plant life, WALL-E falls instantly. Their courtship pulls him aboard the Axiom, the corporate spaceliner where humanity has been floating for 700 years, drinking liquid meals and staring at screens strapped to their faces. 

The first forty minutes are nearly silent. Pixar trusted a kid audience to sit with rusted machinery, wind, and the soft scrape of a robot organizing forks. That patience is different now. As a child I read it as quietly; as an adult I read it with confidence. Every frame on Earth carries texture, weight, and ruin. The Axiom sequences land with a different kind of horror. Humans slumped in hover-chairs, eyes locked on tablets, missing the pool right in front of them. I watched this on my phone, paused it to check Instagram, and laughed at myself because it’s the reality we live in now. 

Pixar made a film in 2008 predicting 2026 with disturbing accuracy. Disposable culture, attention capture, screens replacing rooms; the diagnosis is older than I thought. What saves the film from feeling preachy is WALL-E himself. His curiosity is the antidote. He picks things up, holds them, asks what they are. 

This holds up. It might hold up better now than it did then. WALL-E is streaming on Disney+ and worth a rewatch even if, especially if, you have not touched it since you were small.

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