By now, you've probably been made aware of Wall-E, Pixar's upcoming attempt to kill us all with overwhelming, radiating cuteness. And Wall-E, the lovable, wide-eyed scamp of a robot at the center of the movie is very, very cute. He looks like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, but smaller, less vocal, and without the troublingly close relationship with Steve Guttenberg—all of which makes Wall-E possibly the cutest movie robot ever, despite the fact that his story takes place in the aftermath of some kind of horrific, cataclysmic, and unexplained event that forced all living humans to evacuate Earth.
Watching him happily wheel around the giant, rusting junkyard that dominates the landscape of future Earth, you don't even think about the ghosts of the long-dead people who used to inhabit the place before their civilization came crashing down all around them and they were forced to abandon their lives and their planet under the threat of imminent danger. Wall-E's adorable little meeps and moops as he roots through piles of trash looking for something to play with, totally drown out the imagined terrified screams of human evacuees and the deafening silence of an abandoned Earth. And when he picks up that ancient bra from the garbage and hilariously places it on his innocent robot eyes, it's easy to forget that that bra was once worn close to the beating heart of a living, breathing woman who was probably separated from her children in the wake of the unnamed disaster, and who now has to live in exile, far away from Earth, haunted by the knowledge that had she just held onto their hands a little tighter, maybe they would all still be together, even if that meant drowning in the mountains of waste that gradually overtook Earth's surface.
Seriously, post-apocalyptic Earth has never been more precious. You win, Wall-E.