WALL·E

An animated film set on an abandoned Earth. The people left seven hundred years ago. What remains is heaps of rubbish and the robots left behind to clear it; all of them have broken down, and one is still working. WALL-E compacts rubbish into cubes every day and stacks them into towers. He takes interesting things home: a lighter, a spoon, a video cassette. He is alone. His only friend is a cockroach. One day a ship lands and leaves a robot. EVE is looking for a plant, and WALL-E falls in love with her. There is almost no speech in the first forty minutes. Communication runs on sound effects, movement and two notes, and the narrative never strains at it. Then the film goes into space. The people live on a ship, do not move, look at screens and have forgotten how to walk. What the narrative is interested in is not the environment but immobility: the film shows the rubbish as a result rather than a cause, and its real criticism is comfort. The voices of the robots came from a sound designer rather than a voice actor. Ben Burtt built their speech out of electronic sound, and that sound became the whole character. Footage from an old musical is used in the film, and almost everything WALL-E knows about people comes from that cassette. The imaging deliberately imitates real cinema optics; lens imperfections, focus shifts and depth were added to the animation on purpose. Andrew Stanton wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes wordless storytelling and science fiction; small children can watch it too. Who it is not for: anyone who will mind that the second half is more conventional than the first; the ship section works like a classic cartoon.