By CHRISTY LEMIRE
Within the rumbling, stumbling hunk of junk that is WALL-E beats the sweetest, warmest heart - a robotic representation of humanity's highest potential.
And within the sci-fi adventure "WALL-E" lies an artistic truth: that Pixar's track record remains impeccable.
Following high-concept movies about a superhero family, talking cars and a gourmet rat, this is the Disney computer animation arm's boldest experiment yet. "WALL-E" is essentially a silent film in which the two main characters, a mismatched pair of robots, communicate through bleeps and blips and maybe three words between them.
And yet director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") is resourceful enough to find infinite ways for them to express themselves - amusingly, achingly, and with emotional precision. He's also created, with the help of a team of animators, a visual marvel. Not that this is in any way surprising from a Pixar flick, but still, it's worth noting.
The smudged, dented metal that makes up WALL-E's frame looks so realistic, you could reach out and touch it; at the same time, his big eyes often appear so vulnerable and pleading, you can't help but feel a connection with him. The characters are adorable without being too cutesy, accessible to adults and children alike.
Ben Burtt, a multiple Oscar winner who created R2-D2's signature sound effects in the "Star Wars" movies, provides the "voice" of WALL-E, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. Seven hundred years after Earth was abandoned, leaving the planet looking like a post-apocalyptic Tomorrowland, WALL-E is still doing the job he was programmed to do: pick up all the trash he sees around him and compress it into tidy packages.
But he's a romantic at heart with an eye for nostalgia, sifting through garbage for items like bowling pins, a Rubik's Cube, an iPod, a spork. The script, which Stanton co-wrote with Jim Reardon from a story he co-wrote with Pete Docter, evokes iconic cultural items and imagery without going for the cheap pun or empty celebrity gag. Genuflections to "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Alien" seem fitting, as does WALL-E's physical resemblance to E.T. (It's one of the movies that earned Burtt an Academy Award for best sound effects editing.)
He's an odd, lovely combination: He carries himself like a little old man, but has the innocence and wonderment of a child. It's only upon the arrival of the sleek, shiny Eve (voiced by Elissa Knight), a robot sent back to the planet on a search mission, that he realizes how lonely he's been. That she's everything he's not - new, quick, high-tech, efficient - is only part of the allure. She's someone with whom he can finally share all the lost treasures he's amassed, and she seems open to the idea of making a friend in him, too.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the universe, the remaining humans are lolling about in a giant flying cruise ship. (Kathy Najimy and Pixar veteran John Ratzenberger provide two of the passengers' voices, with Jeff Garlin as their boisterous but clueless captain.) Thanks to the big, evil corporation that runs the place (and ruined Earth), every convenience is available at their chubby fingertips - oh yes, we as a people have gotten fatter and lazier in the future, it seems. And the possibility of useless consumption is overpowering and ever-present.
So maybe it's more than a little hypocritical for a movie that's being distributed by a worldwide entertainment conglomerate to condemn needless spending on food, toys, stuff, you name it. Fred Willard, the only live-action human, plays the film's CEO with typically humorous buffoonery - perhaps that's intended to make the message more palatable.
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By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
Who would guess that a movie with minimal dialogue and a love story between robots could emerge as one of the best films of the summer? And who would think a tale could be both post-apocalyptic and charming?
But when it's from Pixar Animation, which brought us Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Toy Story, nothing is a stretch.
The engaging and visually stunning computer-animated WALL·E (* * * * out of four) is a significant departure for the studio, with its sci-fi plot and soundtrack of beeps and buzzes that serve as communication between the bots.
The film cements the place of writer/director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) in the Pixar pantheon. WALL·E is inventive, poignant and funny in its tale of a spunky robot whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class.
The story is set in 2700, when Earth has become a ghost town. Somehow, WALL·E was overlooked in the planet's evacuation, so he keeps bravely doing what he was programmed to do: transport trash. In his spare time, he befriends a cockroach and sifts through garbage, collecting artifacts.
He meets a sleek robot named EVE, and in his enthusiasm to win her over, he gives her his prized find: a tiny, struggling plant.
EVE takes it back to her space station, where earthlings have been lounging around for centuries, waiting to return to Earth. The computerized powers at the station regard the plant as proof that Earth is ready to be re-colonized.
In truth, Earth has become a stark wasteland. A cautionary tale with striking ecological implications, the message is artfully interwoven into the plot.
The story is set amid breathtaking visuals: Giant skyscrapers built of trash fill Earth's horizon, and WALL·E's plunge into outer space is gorgeous, his dance through space exhilarating.
Meanwhile, the descendants of those who populated Earth have become massive, flabby beings with tiny, almost-vestigial limbs. They spend their days in moving recliners equipped with screens, in their own virtual worlds, avoiding human contact. The space way station — a blend of giant mall and sterile vacation land — is the brainchild of corporate titan Shelby Forthright (a perfectly cast Fred Willard).
The plucky WALL·E embarks on an exciting and emotional space odyssey around the galaxy. As he and EVE develop an attachment and save each other from peril, their cries of "EVE-ahh" and "WALL-eee" are heart-tugging.
WALL·E is at once futuristic, funny and fantastical. It's an extraordinarily captivating adventure, laden with equal parts humor and heart and populated with memorable and endearing characters. (Rating: G. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes. Opens in select theaters tonight and nationwide Friday.)
Excellent! Not that I care much what the critics say, but I just love it when Pixar knocks another one out of the park!
From ew,there's a way to measure how well an animated film takes over your imagination. Do you forget, during the movie, that you're even watching animation? Do the textures and settings, the fantasy-land characters, become — for lack of a better word — real? That, or something close to it, is what happened to me during WALL-E, the puckishly inventive, altogether marvelous new digitally animated feature from Pixar. The movie sets us down in a rusty, postapocalyptic urban desert, all glaring sun and junk-heap skyscrapers, where the only living thing, or at least the only thing that moves, is WALL-E, a cute, squat robot with droopy binocular eyes whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth-Class. That's a very fancy way of saying that WALL-E is a roving trash compactor — and, in fact, he's the last of his breed. Hundreds of years after humans fled the earth, he's still doing what he's been built to do, molding scrap metal into bricks and piling them into neat towers.
For a while, WALL-E is nearly wordless, and the director, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), stages the early scenes with a gentle, unhurried mystery that is unabashedly Spielbergian. He forges a world that's casually amazing in its tactile metallic grandeur. In computer animation perfectly reproduced the waxy sheen of plastic playthings, and here, in a comparable way, you feel as if you could reach out and touch all the metal detritus. As a character, WALL-E is like R2-D2 gone Charlie Chaplin in the land of The Road Warrior. Almost everything he does is something he's been programmed to do, but after centuries he's developed stubborn wisps of individuality, like his penchant for plopping in a scratchy videotape of the 1969 Hollywood version of Hello, Dolly! WALL-E uses several of that film's musical numbers (in particular, the gorgeous ''It Only Takes a Moment'') in a way that's at once tenderly romantic and almost Kubrickishly eerie.
After a while, a spaceship lands, and WALL-E meets EVE, a frictionless white pod with cathode-ray eyes who's been sent to earth to search for organic life. (Her name stands for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator.) These two don't talk, exactly, but they holds hands and burble each other's names. It's love at first digital bleep. WALL-E is a movie you want to discover, but without giving too much of it away, I'll just say that the early ''silent movie'' section, quietly enticing as it is, is merely the prelude to an eye-boggling future-shock adventure. WALL-E himself is the movie's mascot and unlikely hero; it's up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who've ''evolved'' into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart. I'm not sure I'd trust anyone, kid or adult, who didn't get a bit of a lump in the throat by the end of WALL-E, a film that brings off what the best (and only the best) Pixar films have: It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own. A
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