Andrew Stanton's Wall-E (2008) is an intelligent film that expects an intelligent audience. In the first hour of the film, only three words are spoken: "Wall-E," the name of the trash-organizing robot; "Eve", a robot sent to earth to find plant life (and the name of Wall-E's later love interest); and "directive," the purpose of every robot. Yet the expressions and body movements Pixar has given to Wall-E makes his emotions come through clearly and allow us to sympathize immediately with him. Wall-E is a romantic, and his budding romance with Eva (who initially tries to disintegrate him as a hostile object) is a delight to watch unfold.

The second half of the film moves into space and visits a space cruiser in which humans have devolved into obese consumers transported around in floating easy chairs and waited on by an army of service robots. At this point the film redirects its attention to a conflict between a head robot dedicated to maintaining the status quo (and who recalls HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey), and the team of Wall-E and Eve (along with the malfunctioning robots who assist them). This is not as groundbreaking as the opening on the post-apocalyptic earth, but it carries forward the film's criticism of American (and Western) culture in the twenty-first century.

The film's environmental message is timely, if inconsistent. The fact that Wall-E uses a magnified Ipod to watch movies, and that he generates the Apple restart sound when restarting his system (after being solar charged, of course), overly complicates the film's topical focus by suggesting that some types of consumerism might not contribute as much to environmental damage as others. On the other hand, the film's overly simplistic ending offers a happy, Disney-Pixar solution to a highly complex problem. Despite these imperfections, however, the film's message remains clear, its didacticism avoiding heavy-handedness by wrapping itself in an entertaining story palatable to a mixed audience of children and adults.

Perhaps the most compelling element of Wall-E is its concern with what it means to be human. Wall-E's desire to be loved--which is tenderly demonstrated in his practicing holding hands--combines with his innocence to make him appear more human than the human passengers aboard the spaceship. This Disney-Pixar creation moves well beyond the anthropomorphism of machines and objects in other, earlier features. By the end of the film, this robot's personality has become so precious because so familiar--we care as much as we do about Wall-E because he has proven himself to be a caring person.

by Dustin Stegner