by Sapphire Mason-Brown

Created on: July 14, 2008   Last Updated: December 15, 2009

You'll Believe a robot can fall in love

Director: Andrew Stanton
Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, Sigourney Weaver

Wall-E is the latest outing from children's film favourite, Pixar. Since their debut in 1995, Pixar have been anything but disappointing touching on the lives of toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, and now, a lovable robot. Clearly, Pixar have never made the same film twice and unlike many other studios they have never made a less than three star film. The question is, have Pixar managed to uphold this exemplary film-making record with their most recent work? In the opinion of this reviewer, they have surpassed all of their previous triumphs.

It is 700 years into the future and the population of Earth consists mainly of mountains of garbage (very neatly packed mountains of garbage I might add). Earth was abandoned centuries previously as due to excessive waste it became uninhabitable. To clean up our planet hundreds of Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - E Class) robots were sent to Earth to, essentially, clear up the mess we left. Unfortunately, after such a long period of time all of the robots have been destroyed; all of the robots but one, our protagonist, Wall-E. Wall-E rolls around the Earth picking up piles of trash, compacting them into small cubes and heaping these into mountains. He contently does this picking up 'interesting' human objects with only the company of a cockroach and the musical sounds of Barbra Streisand recorded from a VHS of Hello, Dolly!

The premise of the film doesn't appear to be one that would work on a feature length level. For much of the film there is no dialogue except Wall-E's beeps and pronunciation of his own name with a robotic speech impediment (voiced by Ben Burtt of Star wars fame). Despite this, Pixar make Wall-E an engaging character showcasing their ability to make any creature sentient and lovable, I personally await what Pixar would do with stationary rocks.

It is not until the arrival of Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a new mac-like robot when compared to our PC Wall-E, that there is any change in Wall-E's life. Instead of spending time watching Hello, Dolly! Wall-E instead follows Eve attempting to woo her with bizarre shows of affection for instance, building a model of her out of pieces of waste. This is unsuccessful causing Wall-E to try even harder showing her his never-ending collection of "impressive" waste such as a rubix cube, a tape and of course,

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