He spends his days scooting around the ruins of a devastated city, compacting cubes of trash in his boxy middle and stacking them into piles as high as skyscrapers. Wall-E (whose clicks and beeps were created by sound designer Ben Burtt) is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, the last functioning robot left on a planet abandoned by humans 700 years ago. Yet Wall-E is an improbable delight, a G-rated crowd-pleaser that seems poised to pack theaters as efficiently as the titular robot crams his chest cavity with rubble.
It’s a largely dialogue-free story set on a planet Earth nearly devoid of organic life, and its view of humanity’s future is about as dark as dystopias get. Wall-E (Disney) pushes the purist aesthetic of Pixar animation to the borders of the avant-garde.
