Wall-E (2008)

How is it that Pixar can animate the inanimate and have their animated characters display more character and personality than some live actors in other major Hollywood fare? I don't care to know the nuts and bolts of how they do it, simply because the utter magic of a Pixar movie is just that -- and Wall-E is no exception.

The title robot is programmed for cleaning up a trash-ridden Earth of the future, here a throwaway culture has gotten the better of, well, everything. Wall-E has a lonely existence, but he's filled his life with the detritus of life on this planet -- everything from old Christmas lights to a Rubik's cube -- and made it all his own in his quaint home. He shares his home with a little cockroach (and who but Pixar could make a roach cute?), and it's all rather humdrum for them both until one day when a spaceship shows up, leaving behind a sleek, powerful robot with an obviously singular mission. Wall-E and Eva, as he learnes her name is, aren't sure what to make of each other at first, but it doesn't take long until, well, the usual Pixar magic happens.

Eva's mission, it turns out, is to find plant life -- any plant life -- on Earth. Why this mission is so important becomes clear later in the film, and in the meantime, she returns (with Wall-E desperately in tow -- he's in love, after all!) to the mother ship with some very precious cargo in stow. The mothership, it turns out, is home to Earthlings now that Earth is mostly no longer inhabited, or inhabitable. That's where that telltale plant comes in, and it's how Wall-E and Eva find each other, lose each other, find each other again, and save the day when the bad guys emerge in the story.

If you're detecting a prime opportunity for an environmental message, you're right -- but to their enormous credit, writers Andrew Stanton (who directed), Jim Reardon (of Simpsons fame), and Pete Docter avoid getting preachy, instead allowing the message to emerge from the story and characters, and doing so in a very positive, upbeat way. It's a welcome bromide to the pedantic tendencies of films with environmental messages aimed at children, which are often more green-religious than scientific in tone.

Wall-E is yet another wonderful family movie from the Pixar geniuses. For us older kids, it's great to have the cockles of the heart warmed anew, and to bask in the glory of love with a great onscreen couple: Wall-E and Eva.