The opening act of WALL-E takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth where the titular robot has been stacking trash cubes for years – but just how old is WALL-E, and how long has he been unsuccessfully trying to clean up Earth? After being impressed with the Pixar animators’ recreation of underwater physics for Finding Nemo, director Andrew Stanton was convinced that the studio could handle a movie set mostly in outer space. So, Stanton got to work on a cautionary tale about the wastefulness that will inevitably become humanity’s undoing.
Considering it’s primarily a kids’ movie, WALL-E deals with some huge subjects, like environmentalism, corporatocracy, and the possibility of a doomsday scenario. In its opening frames, it plunges the audience into a haunting futuristic vision of Earth where the planet is filled with so much trash that it can no longer sustain human life. But the movie is vague about exactly how long Earth has been uninhabitable, and how much time WALL-E spent naively following his programming and piling up the garbage before EVE showed up.
WALL-E Is Over 700 Years Old In The Pixar Movie
The backstory of WALL-E establishes that the Earth succumbed to ecocide sometime in the 22nd century, thanks to corporate greed, widespread consumerism, and the destruction of the environment. This is when Earth became the trash-filled wasteland seen in the early sequences of the movie. Long before the story begins, a megacorporation called Buy n Large loaded the rest of the human race onto enormous starliners and sent them drifting through space. The company left behind trash-compacting robots to clean up the planet, with the goal of returning shortly. However, the cleanup was a complete failure and humanity remained in space.
When the movie begins, WALL-E is the last remaining active trash-compacting robot on Earth. He keeps himself alive by recycling spare parts, and over the years, he’s become sentient and developed a wholesome personality. By this point, WALL-E is over 700 years old and is continuing to stack cubes of garbage into skyscraper-sized structures in a futile bid to make Earth liveable once again. This makes WALL-E the oldest Pixar protagonist by far. The runner-up, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen from Up, is nearly 10 times younger than the little trash-compacting robot that could.
What Year Is WALL-E Set?
WALL-E takes place in the year 2805, nearly 800 years beyond the film’s 2008 release date. By the time the movie catches up with its titular trash-compacting robot, humanity has long since abandoned any plan to return to Earth. But no one told WALL-E, so he’s still chugging along, piling up the trash cubes, waiting for the human race to come back to its home planet. With its 29th-century setting, WALL-E takes place even further into the future than most other sci-fi movies.
