Trash tale 'WALL-E' a treasure

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It isn't often an animated film stays in my head for more than a few seconds after the credits begin rolling. But here I am, a week after seeing the new Pixar film, "WALL-E," and I can't stop thinking about it.

First off, the movie is amazing on countless levels. I'm not in the business of recommending movies, but it'd truly be a shame to miss this one. Whatever age you are, I think you'd actually have to try to not enjoy this film.

For those who don't know, "WALL-E" is the story of a mobile trash-compacting robot left to clean up the toxic mess humans made before they fled the planet to live in a spaceship. WALL-E spends his days collecting garbage into squares he piles higher than skyscrapers. He spends his nights alone in a shed, surrounded by human artifacts he's collected, lonely for the race that created him before it destroyed itself 700 years earlier. His best friend is a cockroach that, unless you count the robot, is the only life remaining on a planet that has the sad look and feel of a junkyard at night.

And yet, somehow, "WALL-E" manages to come across as that rare feel-good apocalyptic movie. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that a film highlighting the dangers of overconsumption will sell billions of dollars in merchandise, mostly all of which someday will end up in landfills. But none of that is why "WALL-E" is stuck in my mind.

No, this movie works because -- unless we manage to blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons first -- it feels like this really is how life on Earth will play out. In the film, we have been reduced to a spaceship full of fat, atrophied blobs that suck liquid food and drinks through straws as we ride around in carts, scooting from one sale to the next, our only value filling the coffers of corporations. In a lot of ways, it's like spending an afternoon at Wal-Mart. And that's when it hits you: Hey, this ain't really science fiction; Mister, this is the here and now.

Last week, the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement urging a new approach is needed to fight the country's growing weight problem. Essentially, nothing we've tried to this point is working. On our current path, two of every five adults and one of every four children in this country will be obese by 2015. Many of us literally are eating ourselves to death. When the largest of us dies, walls have to be torn down to remove house-bound bodies that stopped fitting through doors years earlier. The byproduct of this consumption is a gargantuan garbage problem that cannot be overstated.

Here's one example: There is an area 1,000 miles off the California coast known as the central North Pacific gyre, where a dense buildup of plastic debris spans an estimated 5 million square miles. Folks, that's roughly the size of all 50 United States plus India. One hundred million tons of floating plastic already litters the world's oceans, and an additional 60 billion pounds of plastic will be produced by industry this year, according to a story that ran last week in the Los Angeles Times.

(Right now, in the name of science and garbage awareness, two researchers are floating toward Hawaii on a raft they made from the cockpit of a Cessna 310, salvaged from the desert and placed atop 15,000 plastic bottles held together by nets. The raft is called Junk. Read day-to-day accounts of their adventure at www.junkraft.com.)

Obviously, there are countless examples showing how humans have been no friend to the environment. Suffice to say, there are many places where our activities have rendered the air unbreathable, the water undrinkable and the food supply toxic. And we have no one to blame but ourselves, which is one of the threads that runs through "WALL-E."