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.”