WALL-E

Starring the voices of: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver

Director: Andrew Stanton

Category: I

Who'd have thought that, after years of invigorating animation films, Pixar would deliver its best work yet with a film on a garbage-processing, cockroach-befriending robot? The film is at once masterfully witty and intensely poignant. It mixes a simple love story with both an ecological message and a nod to masterpieces from the cinematic canon.

WALL-E proves that even in a computer-generated world, using less visual trickery can yield rich sensory rewards.

Revolving around the title character, whose name is an abbreviation for 'Waste Allocation Lift Loader, Earth-Class', the film begins 700 years from now, when the Earth no longer supports life and serves as a massive intergalactic rubbish dump. The desolate landscape sets the scene for the work of WALL-E (his sporadic monosyllabic mutterings voiced by Ben Burtt).

In the dialogue-free first reel, he is shown as a starry-eyed minion toiling and resting with no company save his pet cockroach and a collection of pop culture relics (the most-loved being videotapes of early 20th-century Hollywood musicals) he has unearthed.

His melancholy is soon broken by the arrival of a spaceship, from which emerges EVE (short for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, voiced by Elissa Knight), an automaton who can take to the air and fire devastating missiles at will. WALL-E and EVE have a misunderstanding, resolve it and befriend each other. The Earth-bound robot shows his new friend (and object of his romantic crush) around his home, where EVE discovers a plant, which, when placed inside her, leads her to become a lifeless pod, awaiting the arrival of her overseer.

Until this moment, the film shapes itself up as a clever and affecting modern take on a Chaplinesque silent film, centred on a tender romance between a grubby, bumbling ingenue and a glamorous siren. The way the film begins with Put On Your Sunday Clothes, however, gives a clear signal of an exciting day for WALL-E.

The film suddenly shifts gear, with the protagonists propelled into an intergalactic adventure featuring a vessel full of human diaspora, led by a captain (Jeff Garlin) and his much-trusted computer (Sigourney Weaver, a sharp choice of casting given that her breakthrough role saw her engage with a digital brain in Alien). The locale may have changed and the film may have become more action-driven, but the emotional power and the droll play on conventions and scenes from past legendary films (2001: Space Odyssey, among others) remains.

Conjuring a perfect blend of entertainment which appeals to audiences of all ages, director Andrew Stanton manages to inject a social message into the proceedings, drawing up a potential worst-case-scenario for consumerist capitalism (with humankind dominated by a company called Buy and Large) and obsessions about colonisation of outer space. The message is woven with deftness into the film, without overshadowing the storytelling. It is in such artful ways of both playing to the mind and the heart that WALL-E triumphs.

WALL-E opens today