WALL-E

Well, Pixar has done it again. The animation studio has, in this person's view, had an amazing streak of quality films that appeal to both children and adults. I thought only one was a clunker, and that was Cars, and it hindsight it probably suffers in comparison to classics like The Incredibles and Toy Story 2 and is still better than most animated films. Now Pixar and director Andrew Stanton have given us a science-fiction love story that is also a cautionary tale about the environment and corporations run amok.

It is the year 2775. Earth is so choked with garbage that the human race has abandoned the planet. All that's left are robots who compact the refuse into cubes and stack it. These are labeled WALL-E, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth class. We only meet one of them, so I'm not sure if he is the only one, but he's a lonely little mechanical fellow. His only friend is a cockroach (if you thought if was tough to make rats cuddly in Ratatouille, be amazed as you warm to this six-legged vermin). WALL-E has a personality, though, and likes to collect things that he finds among the junk. He has a de facto museum of humanity in his domicile, where he likes to watch a video of Hello, Dolly. In a way he's the cinematic heir to the silent slapstick kings like Chaplin and Keaton, as he frequently is at physical odds with his surroundings.

Then one day he gets a visitor. Or rather, Earth does. It's a sleek, ovoid-shaped robot with a feminine voice. After determining WALL-E is harmless, she doesn't blast him to bits and eventually they communicate. She's called Eve, and her directive is classified. WALL-E shows her his place and the lovestruck roboto woos her, but once she finds he has a scraggly plant growing in a boot full of dirt, she zooms back to her point of origin.

Turns out she's a probe from the "cruise liner" where mankind has been living for seven-hundred years. The suspiciously Wal-Mart like corporation that has taken over the world have taken on people in what was supposed to a five-year trip until the Earth was cleaned up, but things got a little behind schedule. Humans are now coddled so much they are grossly obese and don't even walk, instead gliding around in hoverchairs and looking only at computer screens in front of their face. How procreation and elimination are handled are left to the imagination.

So it turns out that the plant is a very important thing, and the rest of the movie is spent with WALL-E and Eve trying to keep it safe. This is all suspenseful, funny and touching. Though the two robots have a very limited vocabulary (mostly they just say each other's names) the relationship feels real. Legendary sound man Ben Burtt supplies the voice of WALL-E.

Of course there are all sorts of subtexts here. One is the environmental message, and it's a bit daring for a Walt Disney picture to start off a kid's animated film with a bleak vision of the future. Then there's the slap at Wal-Mart, which is clearly the model for Buy 'n' Large, the superstore that has taken over the world (Fred Willard plays their CEO, and he's not animated). Finally, there is the depiction of the overfed and infantilized humans. Some have seen this as an insult of middle-America of some sort, but this is op-ed bloviating. It only stands to reason that a civilization waited on hand and foot and discouraged from exercising would become this way, and it would be an all-around bad thing. Is that a shocking point of view?

It's a given that the animation is brilliant. I was especially captivated by the details in WALL-E's lair of the trinkets and gewgaws he's collected, from a plastic spork to a Rubik's Cube. As those of us who appreciate good cinema sit around and gross about how movies are going to shit, driven by studios who just want to cater to the tastes of teenage boys, we can take comfort that in the arena of animation, Pixar has been churning out one classic after another, rivaling (and dare I say surpassing) the golden age of Disney.