The story of a city built deep within the Earth to provide refuge for the human population following some sort of disaster or imminent decline on its surface, in many ways, The City of Ember is reminiscent of Pixar's Wall-E. The central story of both is a mission to return to the world that was left behind. Ready and waiting to challenge that mission is an inability to recognize the viability of any other world but the one they know. And continuing to motivate those who seek that old/new world even when all odds are against them is an awareness that the artificial world they have lived in for so long is somehow lacking, and that somewhere out there is another world that is not.

While Wall-E opens on Earth and later journeys to the Axiom space station, The City of Ember opens in the subterranean city of Ember and stays there for almost the entire movie. When we arrive, it is a day like any other for most of its citizens. Upon first glance, the world does not seem that bad, a bit antiquated maybe, different for sure, but inhabitable enough. That is until we spend more than a few minutes with the people living inside Ember and begin to see what life is really like.

The first noticeable problem is that the city is falling apart. Soon after the movie begins, Ember experiences a blackout. We learn that these blackouts have recently become regular occurrences, each one lasting longer than those before and sending the citizens of Ember into an increasingly frenzied panic with each repeat occurrence. "Thanks to the mighty capacity of the generator&ellips; ours is the only light in the dark world," says the Mayor (Bill Murray) at the beginning of the movie. But as it becomes more and more evident that the capacity of Ember's generator is not mighty anymore, the scary reality Ember's citizens face is that there soon may be no light in their world at all. Add to that food and medicine shortages, failing crops, technology that has long since become nonfunctional, and fixes that are at best temporary patches, and the fate of Ember does not look good.

The second noticeably disconcerting aspect of life in Ember is its lack of freedom and almost overly controlled existence. The obvious limitation of the city of Ember is its physical one. Enclosed in the middle of the earth with a sky constructed of light bulbs, it has a clear floor and ceiling not to be crossed. Any whispers of another world are quickly squelched. And when one citizen even ventures into the city's "outer regions," he is treated as a contaminate and severely punished.

Beyond the physical, it is the sense of control and limitation that infiltrates the daily lives of all those living in Ember that is almost more alarming. On assignment day, children are given the jobs they will do for the rest of their lives by hat drawing. As a longtime laborer in the city's underground pipe system tells his trainee, if it's not his job, he knows nothing about it. As one character tells another, "There's far too much to do here to worry about what's out there." But in the two young heroes of the movie, we encounter not only a recognition that something is wrong with their own world, but that there has to be something else out there. Much like the captain in Wall-E, Doon Harrow (Harry Treadway) looks at picture books full of animals he has never seen in his lifetime with wonder. Drawing a picture of houses, Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) colors a blue sky overhead with longing. Although Doon first sets off into "adulthood" with a determination to fix Ember's generator, when he comes to see how fragile it is, he becomes equally determined to find a more powerful source of life and light that he is certain exists somewhere. When Lina finds a key to a world beyond the one she has always known, instead of hiding it in fear, she pursues it with hunger.

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