I haven't watched a cartoon in the theater since the debacle that was Madagascar. I wrote about my experience a few years ago, watching the jungle-themed feature in a cramped movie theater with about fifty silent elementary school-aged students and their parents. No one laughed. Over the weekend, I shared a similar experience with a crowded theater full of mostly adults, who were awed by the animation, yet stunned by the message of this eco-friendly 'toon.

I've been thinking over the delivery and message of WALL·E for a few days now, and I'm still not sure what to think. I went with my wife because she wanted to see it, and what we saw was visually stunning. I often forgot that I wasn't watching a live-action piece, with the depictions of the lost cities of earth, the rumbling of WALL·E through the trash, and even his interactions with EVE. Quite honestly, the movie broke down for me when he finally met up with the humans, and escaped earth. Pixar apparently bombs at people-making!

To be brutally honest, I expected to hate WALL·E. I'd heard that the first "hour" was entirely dialogue free, and I HATED the time Tom Hanks spent on the island by himself in Cast Away. But beyond the graphics, the way in which the creators characterized WALL·E were pretty astute, even if he sometimes came off as a rip-off of Short Circuit. Still, this isn't a cute, kid-friendly movie. It makes the deaths of Simba and Bambi's parents look like a walk in the park in some respects. This is an apocalyptic warning, a message of doom, and you and I are condemned. But there's hope.

WALL·E depicts a world where trash is king, where our wasteful habits and our desire for more, bigger, and expansive things has driven us from the earth. We have so much trash, so much litter, so much waste, that there's more of it than we could handle—so we took off for the skies and left the WALL·Es of the world to clean up after us. Lesson #1: We're not taking care of our own messes and we expect someone else to clean up after us.

The spaceship, a giant city that we're expected to understand holds millions or billions of people, has become a self-respecting entity like little old WALL·E. Unfortunately, the ship thinks Earth is a place we should never go back to and we (humans) have allowed it to control our future. Lesson #2: Technology makes us lazy. Lesson #3: We can't expect technology to make all our decisions for us.

In the process of living on this ship, humankind has settled for a liquid diet and marketing that convinces us of everything we need; we make no decisions (much like Earth circa 2008) and lesson #2 hasn't been learned yet. So the humans speed around without ever having to get up, move, or interact with each other. Lesson #4: Without exercise, people get fat. Lesson #5: Technology inhibits our ability to communicate with each other.

So far, WALL·E has condemned us as wasteful, sloppy, irresponsible, lazy, ignorant, fat and emotionally stunted. Unfortunately, sitting in the movie theater, I had to recognize that I am each of those things to some degree. To what degree you are each of those things doesn't really make a difference in the world of WALL·E because WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. And like an Old Testament prophet, WALL·E warns the world of 2008 that we should repent and be saved.

With Lessons #1-5 in front of me, I feel pretty hopeless, but WALL·E does in fact leave us on an upswing, with hope and a future. Lesson #6: Even in the midst of hopelessness and chaos, the light can still emerge. Like a child, WALL·E leads humankind back to Earth, because he doesn't know any better; he doesn't know to be hopeless. WALL·E provides the spark of hope and light to the captain of the ship to wake him from his stupor and lead the people to the promised land. WALL·E finds hope in a hopeless situation.

Go see WALL·E. Be prodded and poked. Don't expect to be entertained or spoon-fed or even amused (though you will be amused a few times). But remember that in parables and sometimes even cartoons, we can see the Gospel of revelation and hope for the world. And as a result, be different.