Click the picture for more photos.

Update: Here’s the Bob the Angry Flower cartoon if you don’t know it. Thanks Lisa for pointing out my in joke was a little too in.

Wall-E is as delightful and enchanting as you’ve heard. At Metacritic it currently has a score of 93%; at Rotten Tomatoes, 96%. It enthralled the kids (including ours) who were at our showing, and entertained the adults.

It wasn’t until some hours after I saw it that I realized I’d seen the best 1970s SF eco-disaster movie ever.

In the 1970s, prior to the Star Wars bulldozer rearranging the landscape, there were a number of SF movies that took then-current trends, extrapolated them, and ended up with dark, dystopian futures. Three in particular, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, and Silent Running, took as their premise that overpopulation and pollution would wreck the Earth.

As happens with pop culture over time, the three films have been rendered down to simple summaries. Logan’s Run is about people being killed when they turn 30. Solyent Green is people. And Silent Running, when it’s remembered at all, is all about Trumbull’s groundbreaking special effects, a follow-on to the work he did for 2001. But the three movies had a strong ecological message.

Logan’s Run makes it explicit in its opening text: “The survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city sealed away from the forgotten world outside.” The ecological consequences are all setup, though. The first part of the movie appears to be set in a groovy 1976 theme park, while the latter part is in the unsullied outdoors.

Silent Running is all about the environment. Plants have died off on Earth, and the only ones left are in giant terrariums attached to a freighter orbiting Saturn. When Earth orders the freighter to destroy the domes, Bruce Dern goes crazy and tries to save the plants.

In Soylent Green, overpopulation and resource depletion has led to extreme poverty in the US, with most people subsisting on the future equivalent of hardtack. Charlton Heston’s NY detective ends up in that most film noir of situations, the morally ambiguous man who becomes embroiled in someone else’s conspiracy.

How did Wall-E take the same kind of premise, a used-up and polluted Earth, and end up with a delightful family comedy? More than tone, I think it’s because of the movies’ different focuses. In all three of the earlier movies, the idea is key. Logan’s Run is about what would happen if people had to die when they were 30. Soylent Green is about what would happen if overpopulation and pollution made life miserable. Silent Running is about cool special effects.

Contrast that to Wall-E. Of the four movies, only Wall-E is focused on the characters. There’s a reason why reaction to Pixar’s movie has been OMG CUTE ROBOT SQUEEE! Wall-E has an engaging personality, which is astoundingly-well communicated only by his virtual physicality and an expressive array of sounds. More importantly, Wall-E’s story is a universal one of a lonely person looking for someone to love. The eco-disaster and its results are used satirically, and often played for laughs.

The focus on characters rather than idea is why Wall-E‘s environmental message doesn’t feel as forced. It’s not a polemic, and it’s not trying to convince you that it’s right — thank goodness, since the irony of a blockbuster summer movie earnestly saying “don’t pollute the earth” while its watchers eat tubs of popcorn and drink buckets of soda and buy Wall-E plastic toys and produce tremendous amounts of waste is enough to make heads explode.

The 1970s eco-disaster movies have not all aged well. Logan’s Run is mainly enjoyable as high camp, while Silent Running is turgid in that early-1970s-movie way. Soylent Green is still occasionally chilling, as in the scene where bulldozers scrape rioters off the streets and push them out of the way, and its detective story is of interest on its own. It’ll be interesting to see how Wall-E ages in turn. My guess is that, due to its classic boy-Armatron-meets-girl-iPod story, it will age well.

Where’s Waaaaaaall-E? I don’t see him.

Why is his shelf swinging?

Is that Waaaaaaall-E’s cricket friend? Why did he leap around?

Why did that explode?

What are those red lights?

What is that? Is that a rocket?

What’s that robot’s name?

Why is Eeeeeeva flying around?

Look, I folded up in my seat!

What does die rective mean?

What’s wrong with Waaaaaaall-E’s eye?

I need a drink of water.

Why is he holding on to the rocket?

Why is Waaaaaaall-E floating?

Is Eeeeeeva sick?

Why are those people in chairs?

Does Eeeeeeva like Waaaaaaall-E?

Why did her suit turn from blue to red?

Look, I can bounce in my chair!

Why did Waaaaaaall-E bust through that glass?

Why did that man say that he knew Waaaaaaall-E?

I miss Liza. I want to go home.

Why is Waaaaaaall-E climbing up like that?

Is his name Otto? Why is his voice so deep?

Why did Otto spin like that and then everyone slid off their chairs and piled together?

Why did she say “get ready to have some babies”?

I liked that. I want to come back to the theater.

1. Denial. “This’ll be fun! I’ll plant some bushes and shrubs and pretty pretty flowers, and the butterflies will cavort in the foliage.”

2. Anger. “I don’t have a yard, I have a pile of rocks and a thin layer of dirt! And the soil I bought smells like shit! And the sun is hot, and I think the plants are dying! I can’t believe someone talked me into this!”

3. Bargaining. “Please, let me be done with this. My legs hurt and there’s blood running from the blisters on my hands. And don’t let the plants die. You can have my firstborn and all of my pets if you’ll just make this be over.”

4. Depression. “All of my bushes are drooping. The leaves are falling off of them. That flower wasn’t brown and crispy when I started. I’m a lousy person. I can’t even keep plants alive. I’m surprised I can keep myself alive.”

5. Acceptance. “Hey, the natural yard look is in this year. And it’s okay if all the plants die. I’ll claim that I grew up in Arizona and so I want my garden to look like a barren wasteland.”

This weekend Stephen decided to get started finishing our front flower beds. This is what they looked like before:

This is what two of the three look like now:

Yes, Mom, we did use that black edging stuff that you don’t like. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else that go around the curvy bits as well as that stuff. The good news is that the lamb’s ear and firewitch will cover it up in oh, say, about 10 years.

Most of the plants seem to be doing well despite the heat but there are three that don’t want to snap out of the shock. So I got up early to water them this morning and also watered the kids:

Yesterday we saw a car with three bumper stickers:

• A “PEACE” circle sticker
• A “W The President” sticker
• A “GAS PRICES SUCK!” sticker

The car was, of course, a Ford Expedition.

My yard is made of 90% rocks and 10% fire ants.

Well, neo-prog, really, as Steven Wilson was around six years old during the heyday of prog rock. Caution: overheated lyrics ahead!

And if “Gravity Eyelids” is too noodly dreamy for you, how about “Blackest Eyes”?

Left to our own devices, Misty and I tend to sleep late. Even after having Eli and Liza — and isn’t that a lovely phrase, “having Eli and Liza”? As if we invited them over for dinner one night and they never left — we still occasionally got to sleep until 7 or 7:30.

That’s all over now. Eli gets up with the sun, often at 5:45, or as I call it, “oh, c’mon, kid, we stayed up late watching episodes of Angel”. As soon as he’s up he wanders in and starts talking to Misty.

Even if we could convince him to stay in his room and play without coming and telling us that he’s going to stay in his room and play, we’d be foiled by his colon. Eli has taken to pooping every morning at 6:15. It’s like he’s only eating a mix of beans and bran cereal topped with Metamucil, when in fact he’s only devouring crackers and our patience. So every morning at 6:15 I get to wake up and help him.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if we could keep him quiet. Liza often wakes up around 6:30, but if undisturbed will go back to sleep for a while. This morning, I heard Eli’s high, piping voice as he excitedly told Misty about Zack and Wiki or Word Girl. Over the monitor, I could hear Liza stirring. Please go back to sleep, I thought. Please go back to sleep.

Then Liza said, loudly and clearly, “hewwoooo!”

Hey, friends who aren’t parents, don’t you want to have kids now? I have two I could loan you.

I’ve never listened to a lot of mashups. I appreciate a lot of vs. songs, like most of Party Ben’s, more than I enjoy them. That’s especially true of the Evolution Control Committee’s “Pwn Monkey”, which layers the vocals from Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” over thirty different songs, all chosen to match the vocals’ chord progressions. The song reminds me of constrained writing like a lipogram or a Yngwie Malmsteen solo: technically proficient but not a lot of fun. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album would be much better if I enjoyed Jay-Z, and Sgt. Petsound’s Lonely Hearts Club Band left me cold.

Why, then, can I not stop listening to Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals”? In a lot of ways it’s like “Pwn Monkey” in that it uses a tremendous number of samples and provides the cheap entertainment of “hey, I recognize that sample!” Yet in this case the songs make me happy as songs above and beyond any nostalgia encoded in them. Give a listen to “Hands in the Air” on Girl Talk’s MySpace page and see if you can sit still.

If you want mp3s of the album, Girl Talk will sell them to you for any price, including $0. So, really, why not give them a listen?