I saw WALL-E in the theater last night and really enjoyed it. I found Pixar’s creative muscle to be delightfully flexed. It’s not every day you can pitch a robotic love story and have it rake in $62.5 million during it’s opening weekend.

My brother, ever the political pundit, suggested an environmentalist agenda behind the movie. He may be onto something. After all, Josh Harris said the movie made him want to recycle everything.

However, in an interview with World Magazine’s Megan Basham, WALL-E screenwriter and director Andrew Stanton set the record straight:

“People made this connection that I never saw coming with the environmental movement, and that’s not what I was trying to do. I was just using the circumstances of people abandoning the Earth because it’s filled with garbage as a way to tell my story.

I always knew that I wanted WALL•E to be digging through trash for two reasons: One, I wanted him to be the lowest on the totem pole. It’s a janitorial job; it’s the saddest, lowest status amongst his kind; and it just makes him that much more of a lonely guy. Two, trash is really visual. Even the littlest kid understands when there’s stuff in the way and it needs to be picked up, so I didn’t need to spend time explaining his job. And then I just reverse-engineered from there, ‘OK, if there’s trash everywhere, how did it get there?’”

Seth Godin praised the film as a brave move on Pixar’s part.

Have you seen the movie? What did you think?