WALL-E stays true to Pixar's promise that toy-oriented animation will keep growing with its audience. The title character, a Charlie Chaplin-meets-R2D2 hero, is sure to tap emotions in humans of all ages. The film, like its protagonist, moves from scrappy kiddie comedy to over-the-moon romance. WALL-E conjures magical comedy out of the confusions of adolescence and the wrong turns of adulthood, as well as the exuberance of childhood. It's sometimes bright, sometimes gloomy, but always engaging and accessible.
WALL-E is a game little robot who moves through an abandoned American city with a song in his heart - make that two songs, "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment," which he learned from an ancient Hello, Dolly! videotape. WALL-E, you see, is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth class. And waste is all that's left of people on Earth, which has become a monument to planned and unplanned obsolescence. (Even that videotape is a Betamax.)
Eight hundred years before the movie starts, the Buy N Large mega-corporation sold enough of its products to coat the Earth completely in its trash. Then Buy N Large provided a solution: Send all humans into outer space on mammoth cruise liners while a mechanized cleanup brigade labors to restore the planet. The film's immediate slapstick delights derive from WALL-E's quick, efficient motions: He turns investigations of junk into droll, surprising dance routines - juicy doggerel in motion. (He creates skyscrapers of junk that are as fascinating as the Watts Towers.) Sunny and bitter laughs alike erupt from a blighted landscape.
The movie is a triumph because it's all of a piece. From beginning to end, even when it's delightful, it's dark, and vice-versa. WALL-E develops an edgy romance with an unexpected visitor to Earth: a sleek robot named EVE, an Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator programmed to discover whether anything organic can be grown again on our native soil. The movie takes an elating and unexpected turn when WALL-E follows EVE up into the Buy N Large mother ship. There, all-embracing consumerism has continued apace - and human consumers have become gelatinous blobs. And there, improbably and inspirationally, he becomes a hero in a fight to revive human civilization.
