If you haven’t watched it, the world of WALL-E is very lonely. The earth got so full of garbage in the 22nd century that humans had to leave on giant starliners. Little trash compacting robots like the Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth Class or WALL-E (voiced by Ben Burtt) are left behind to clean everything up. Seven centuries later, our hero is mainly alone, still smashing waste into cubes, then returning home to an abandoned truck to watch a DVD of “Hello Dolly!” and arrange his collection of treasures that he’s come across over the years. He’s got a little cockroach friend (I swear, you will love him, even if bugs freak you out) who spends time with him, but WALL-E is a sweet guy who really needs love in his life.
A sleek floating robot named EVE, which stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, shows up, looking for plant life. The two of them begin to fall in love until WALL-E shows her an actual live plant he discovered, triggering EVE’s ship to come to get her, with WALL-E stowing away. They reach the Axiom, a starliner full of humans who have lost the ability to walk or really do anything for themselves. There is a bit of fat shaming going on here, and as I said, it would be done differently now, but I look at it as forgetting life skills. You know, like the apocalyptic people who get all upset that we don’t know how to build anything or the idea that if, say, we lose all our power from a spun spot or something, we’re all screwed.