Some songs you just can't get behind, even if you like everything by that band. Temper Trap's Soldier On is one such song for me.
But that isn't why I asked you here today. No, what I wish to discuss is of a much more somber import, and one that may well cause you future discomfort should you choose to re-watch this Pixar classic. Now that I have cautioned you, let me get straight to the point; the elephant in the room in WALL-E is simply this, what happened to all the other humans?
Supposedly the Axiom was only one of over 300,000 star liners that Buy n Large launched to carry Humanity to the stars while the Earth was cleaned up. Never mind that it currently takes a dedicated shipyard two years to build an Oasis-class cruise ship, and that such a ship can only accomodate 6000 passengers. We'll just take it on faith that Buy n Large has the wherewithal to build a massive fleet of ships that have over 100x the capacity of today's largest cruise ships, and that it can do it while still producing enough consumer goods to satisfy a population of 200 billion.
Yes, billion. With a "B". That's over 28x the current population of the Earth. And somehow they all get loaded onto star liners and sent into the outer reaches of the Solar System with a minimum of trouble. That would at least explain why the streets of the megalopolis that WALL-E is cleaning aren't clogged with skeletons. Though, how cool would it have been to see that overhead shot WALL-E trucking down the road kicking up the trail of dust, but as the camera zooms in we see the dust is from the billions of bones that his treads have pulverized over the last 700 years? Yeah, not kid friendly, but neither is the fact that of the 200 billion population that left Earth, only 600,000 made it back!
Why? When the Axiom, the flagship of the fleet, returned to Earth to re-colonize, shouldn't it have notified the other 299,999+ ships that the home world was once more suitable for human life? Where there should have been a mad rush of mega-ships trying to land in the handful of operational cradles, there is instead only the Axiom that makes it home. This means that nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven out of every one million (999,997 out of 1,000,000) humans failed to return home. Some of the ships probably suffered catastrophic mechanical failures, either due to failing maintenance or from micro-meteor impacts that shredded them like so much paper-mache. Or, the populations of the ships could have gone psychotic from being cooped up for too long in a cramped space, and they went all Event Horizon on each other. Most likely though is that the ships wore out little by little, and each generation of passengers was born with fewer and fewer people, until at last the star liners were nothing but desolate hulks, drifting endlessly through space, the mummified remains of their passengers randomly bumping around in the micro-gravity of their mass grave.
And it is a good thing, too! The reason they all left was because the Earth couldn't support them anymore, so imagine how bad it would have been for 200 billion people to return to a planet that no longer had the infrastructure needed to support them? No working factories. No farms. No habitable buildings. Nothing but obese people dying in the streets like pods of whales beached on the tepid shores of Arizona*.
So that's the elephant in the room for WALL-E - the massive die-off of Humanity after their gluttony and sloth got the better of them. And since Pixar's movies always bear the weight of subtle (and not-so-subtle) criticism of current affairs, the take-away message is that there are too many humans alive right now, and our consumer-driven culture is going to lead us to our own doom.
But don't worry, the cute robots will save us. Well, some of us. Only the fat ones, really.
*yes, I know there are no oceans near Arizona...yet.
