Wall∙E
2.5 Waffles!

Pixar has made rats lovable, brought toys to life and convinced us the world could be saved by a family of superheroes, but can the geniuses of animation keep kids and adults interested in a film without much dialogue, even if Wall∙E is the cutest robot since R2-D2?

Set hundreds of years after Earth was abandoned by humans because of the huge amount of garbage littered across the planet, Wall∙E is a solitary garbage collecting robot who continues to build skyscrapers of trash by day, and watches Hello, Dolly by night with his best buddy (a cock roach, you knew those little buggers would be the only ones to survive the apocalypse). One day, a strange alien robot, Eve, shows up and our little Wall∙E thinks she is just swell (That’s the innocent way of saying it. In reality, he thinks she is Angelina Jolie of robots), and falls in love with the powerful, career driven lady who’s on a mission, can kick a little booty, and doesn’t have time for fooling around.

Can Wall∙E charm Eve into loving him?

What is her mission?

Wall∙E is like the greatest Charlie Chaplin silent movie ever made as this lovable little pile of nuts and bolts wins over our hearts with his cute reactions, his nervous bumbling and stumbling as he tries to impress Eve, and his bright and cheerful demeanor. It is shocking to see this amount of emotion coming from a robot (and an animated one at that!), and you are left to realize Wall∙E has more charm than the entire cast of The Hills combined.

However, after a fantastic beginning and the introduction of the Wall∙E and Eve love story, director/writer Andrew Staunton and co-writer Jim Capobianco seem to run out of ideas when it comes to advancing the story. The love story starts to take a back seat as Wall∙E ends up on a journey taking him across the universe, but it’s all a bit too Al Gore and preachy for me. The world is abandoned due to our own lack of care for the environment, then they throw in some bashing on people becoming too fat and lazy, then we are reminded about the evils of a huge corporate entity that is taking over the world (I hate the corporations, too, but I go to cute, G-rated, kid movies to get away from that stuff).

Also, Wall∙E has one massive, almost unforgivable flaw. Fred Willard appears in the movie as an all powerful corporate leader, but I don’t mean his voice appears. While all of the characters in Wall∙E are computer generated, Willard’s scenes are filmed and spliced into the movie without altering him in any way. All of the other human characters in Wall∙E are cartoonish looking, and Willard’s non-cartoonish appearance ruins the consistency. It removes the audience from the Wall∙E world and made me wonder why Willard is so different from everything else in the movie. He’s not an alien. The other humans haven’t morphed into aliens. It’s just odd.

You’ll want to bring little stuffed Wall∙E home with you, but try not to fall asleep in the middle of the movie.

Wall∙E is rated G.