The Happening may be only two weeks out of the boxoffice, but if it were to be reimagined in animated form, recast with primarily robotic characters, and retold in a family friendly G-rated fashion, Disney/Pixar's WALL-E could very well be The Happening II: Recolonization.

Due to our consumer-driven anti-ecological lives, Earth has been made uninhabitable. As we see when WALL-E opens in the year 2700, the earth is completely covered with trash. There are no people. There are no plants. And the only forms of "life" for miles around are a tiny robot and his loyal cockroach friend. The landscape is littered with reminders of the global Buy-n-Large corporation that came to rule the planet, a super-corporation feeding the insatiable human appetite for consumption, ease, and waste. We learn about the evacuation of the human population, since earth became uninhabitable some 700 years before. Corporation space stations, by contrast, offered vacationers hover chairs and the best in virtual-reality media screens.

For WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), life consists of compacting trash, collecting select treasures from among the rubble, and going home to watch old musicals on his junkyard TV. Although he diligently goes about his work every day, his wide eyes and friendly personality are constantly searching for something more. But, thankfully, "after 800 years of doing what he was built for," says the movie's tagline, "he'll discover what he was meant for."

One day, while WALL-E goes about his regular tasks, a mysterious ship delivers a small white robot he later comes to know as EVE. As soon as WELL-E sees her, his desire for connection and companionship comes to life more than ever before. Even though EVE is distracted from her mission by nothing, WALL-E continues to try to get her attention with everything he's got. Eventually, he succeeds. But just as soon as he does, his gift of the only plant life on earth essentially sends EVE into a coma. Before he knows it, the ship returns to take EVE back to wherever she is from. And so, WALL-E does what any smitten man would and follows.

Sure, the earth may be a mess. But on EVE's mother ship, life is not exactly full of anything that would make me want to keep on living. Enter EVE and her plant. Much like the dove that carries an olive branch back to Noah after the great flood, EVE and her plant are the sign the ship's crew has been waiting for. But unbeknownst to even the ship's captain, not everyone is on board with the program.

What the mutineers didn't count on, however, was WALL-E. When the plant goes missing, he finds it. When EVE is deemed defective, he rescues her. When he bumps into several of the ship's occupants and knocks them out of their normalcy, they too become aware of how much value exists outside the zombie lives they are living. "We can't just sit here and do nothing," says the Captain when he realizes the tiny plant's promise. "I don't want to survive; I want to live."

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