WALL-E

This script is a beautiful medley of simple direction and poetic storytelling. Writers Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon capture WALL-E’s character with almost no dialogue. They make him come to life on the page through his curious nature and charming naivety.

“A small service robot diligently cubing trash.
Rusted, ancient.
Cute.”

Rusted, ancient, and cute is on the spot—and exactly how his humble and sweet actions portray him to be.

“Wally pries open a panel on Eve’s chest.
Reveals her pulsing BLUE HEART-BATTERY.
Attaches JUMPER CABLES to his own HEART-BATTERY.
Tries to connect the other end to hers.
An automatic defense system blows him off the truck.”

This was one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie. His initial response to basically “jump-start her”, paints a very relatable picture of a simple-minded, old school mechanic just using his common sense. Definitely rusted, ancient, and cute.

Along with WALL-E the robot, the world that WALL-E was designed to clean up is just as characterized as he is. Our desolate planet has been destroyed by our very real human tendencies to acquire more and more stuff, resulting in a deserted earth with mile-high piles of trash. All that remains is WALL-E and presumably other Waste Allocation Loaders.

“What looks like skyscrapers turns into trash.
Thousands of neatly stacked CUBES OF TRASH, stories high.
Rows and rows of stacked cubes, like city avenues.”

Describing the piles of trash as skyscrapers allow us to relate to this new, deserted planet. Constructing “city avenues” to clean up our garbage-filled world is also a uniquely human idea. Currently in Seattle, construction seems to be never-ending (although we’re seeing more condos than story-high towers of trash.) So showing how our affinity with engineering has helped both construct and destroy our world demonstrates how we just might hold the key to our own demise.

The musical and poetic rhythm of the script also painted an image of WALL-E and our new, desolate world. WALL-E’s fascination with the old show tune “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” further shows us his old-fashioned and curious nature. It also displays the sharp contrast between what we once valued and took for granted, with what seems to be our new reality.

“…Close your eyes and see it glisten…”
EXT. PLANET’S SURFACE – CONTINUOUS
A range of mountains takes form in the haze.
Moving closer.
The mountains are piles of TRASH.
The entire surface is nothing but waste.
“…We’re gonna find adventure in the evening air…”
A silhouetted city in the distance.

By the music itself, we would expect a beautiful 1920’s summer evening to emanate in the distance, but instead, we see a dark and dreary wasteland—allowing us to reflect simultaneously on our history and earth’s present-day remains.

Overall this screenplay laid the foundation for everything the movie needed to be—a love story, a scifi, an ode to climate change and life on earth. I wouldn’t expect anything less from Pixar and the makers of Toy Story.