WALL-E

It must have been at least six months ago that I first saw a theatrical trailer for WALL-E. I thought it looked cute, and then promptly forgot about it. Fast forward to about a month ago, when Disney stepped up their brainwashing.... I mean, advertising, and Clara and Trevor suddenly felt compelled to start counting down the days to WALL-E's June 27th release. Clara wrote the super-important date on her calendar, and all four of us started doing ridiculously bad robot impressions of the title character saying his name.

I think the "Let's go see WALL-E" Campaign was particularly fervent because we've been letting the kids watch TV on weekday mornings since school ended. During the school year, TV is what allows us weary parents to sleep in on Saturdays and Sundays. Now that it's summer vacation, we have a much looser definition of the weekend. As a result, Clara and Trevor's impressionable young minds are exposed to a whole bunch of stuff they'd like to eat, buy, see, and do, while Chad and I just try to squeeze in a bit of extra shut-eye. Can you blame us? Our kids get up at six.

Anyway, we decided to wait a few days for the masses to go see the movie first, and today we went to an evening show after picking up Clara from camp. As far as we can remember, this is the first time the four of us have ever gone to a movie together. Chad and I have each taken Clara to the odd flick, but Trevi isn't a huge fan of sitting still for 90 minutes.
We loved it. Thankfully, Trevor wasn't the only kid in the theater asking out loud, "Where is WALL-E going?", "Why are they chasing EVE?", "Why is the pool cover automatic?", and things like that. Clara, a sentimental girl, became quite sad at parts, and I found myself formulating great lesson plans that would use the movie to teach the underlying message (I know, I know, it's summer, but it's just how I'm wired).
Look how thrilled these cuties were to pose with the landfill-bound cardboard replicas of WALL-E and EVE. Chad's cousin Sarah remarked that the souvenir WALL-E popcorn buckets were a nice, plastic contradiction to the moral of the story as well. We didn't buy any popcorn though. Whew.

Our discussion on the way home revealed that neither kid really, really got it. So now we can just continue the conversation. Kudos, Pixar.