WALL-E is a typically vivid Pixar creation, and it's a good thing - he's so cute, the environmental calamity all around him registers as secondary. And maybe the absence of humanity isn't deeply felt because WALL-E has so much of it.
He's tireless, loyal, brave and true. He works himself to exhaustion, then flips open his solar panels to recharge so he can start cleaning up all over again.
Cynics will make the case that WALL-E is another anthropomorphic calculation, next year's Disney World attraction, but that sells the little guy short.
It may be anthropomorphic to assign human attributes to animals, but when it comes to machines like WALL-E, the deus ex machina is US. We ARE our technology, for better and for worse, and little WALL-E is the best of us, surrounded by the worst.
It begins in earnest when the devastated Earth is visited by a ship that leaves behind a mobile probe, just about WALL-E's size. She is EVE, a sleek, white, powerful thing with the near-silent purr of a perfect machine.
We see instantly why noisy, rusty, cubical, tank-treaded WALL-E is smitten, and just as clearly why the free-floating EVE is out of his league (he's quite literally a square, she's fabulously mod).
WALL-E is determined, tough, and the winning first half of "WALL-E" is given over to the little guy's dogged pursuit of this futuristic dream (it's like a boombox falling in love with an iPod). And the romance works. Not since Tramp rolled a meatball over to Lady have animated movies seen a romance as good.
You wonder what kind of movie this might have been had it stayed purely in a world of machines, but it eventually moves, with EVE and WALL-E, to a mothership of human refugees.
