WALL-E is, at heart, a love story.
A love story between robots.
Beneath the top-shelf animation, the too-cute robot speak and the futuristic ecology lesson is an old-fashioned boy-meets-girl story, even if the boy looks like a trash compactor and the girl resembles an iPod.
And like any good romance, boy loses girl, boy tries to win girl back, boy and girl conspire to make Earth habitable for humans. You know, the usual.
Above all it's a delight, another triumph for Pixar Animation Studios. We've come to expect nothing less from the home of the "Toy Story" films, "The Incredibles" and "Finding Nemo," among others.
Where WALL-E stands out is in its storytelling technique, making do without the usual stable of adorable characters uttering whip-smart dialogue. In fact, there's no human language spoken for the first half-hour or so of the film. Instead, director Andrew Stanton relies on the audience to fill in the gaps, which makes the experience all the more satisfying.
The film opens 800 years from now, where WALL-E - Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class - is the last robot on Earth. In fact, except for a cockroach, he's the last moving thing of any kind on the planet. Because humans made such a mess of the place - the implication is that this was caused by Buy 'n Large, a Wal-Mart-type megastore - they moved to space. Currently, the human race resides in luxury aboard the Axiom, a giant spaceship.
WALL-E, of course, doesn't know this. All he knows is that he must do his job, daily - clean up trash, compact it, stack it. Nothing too exciting, especially if you did it every day for 700 years, but hey, it's a living.
He also collects knickknacks: a Rubik's Cube here, a light bulb there, and on an especially good day, something like a plant growing in the rubble.
Then one day a rocket ship lands, and EVE enters WALL-E's life. She's an Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, scanning everything she comes into contact with. When she first sees WALL-E, she tries to blast him. He is, of course, immediately smitten.
It takes WALL-E a while -- as evidenced by his work ethic, he's nothing if not persistent - but he eventually gets EVE to check out a movie in his living quarters. She's somewhat indifferent to him, even when he starts offering her trinkets he's collected from his collection. But then she spots one item in particular, and everything changes, instantly and forever.
Turns out WALL-E might just have found the key to bringing everyone back home.
Not that he knows it. All he knows is that EVE has high-tailed it back to the Axiom, her home base, and he plans to pursue her.
The story shifts once on-board. Centuries of reclining have left the population a little out of shape, to say the least, while a steady diet of nothing but easy entertainment on video screens has had a similar effect on their intellect. One of WALL-E's neat tricks, in fact, is to render the robots more human than the humans.
The Captain (voice of Jeff Garlin of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fame) is excited by EVE's finding. But complications await.
The animation is stunning. The landscapes of the futuristic Earth offer the Pixar folks ample opportunity to show off their wares. Their work has become so realistic one could easily mistake the background shots for real life - if real life meant stacks of garbage as tall as skyscrapers.
The all-star cast also includes the voices of Sigourney Weaver, Kathy Najimy and John Ratzenberger.
The biggest achievement, however, is making the audience care about WALL-E. He looks like an outtake from Short Circuit. You can only figure out what he's trying to say about half the time (though context helps) and he's rather single-minded of purpose. But by the end of the film he earns our emotional attachment; in fact, he demands it. EVE is - by design -more remote.
But through courage, selflessness and a childlike innocence, WALL-E becomes a hero. What self-respecting robot could resist?
Rated G.
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