Voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Sigourney WeaverDirector: Andrew StantonIt's an idea, Stanton says, that came up while they were throwing around some, one day in Pixar Studios: the story of a lone robot left behind on Earth that someone forgot to switch off. Stanton has developed it into a love story that is one of the most touching to have ever made it to the big screen.Walla.E has no dialogues for its whole first half — it involves robots— and its central character is a robot yellowed and dusty with 700 years of work. However, whether it’s clearing up trash left behind by humankind that deserted Earth in a hurry, into neat boxes, or gathering up what it feels are useful stuff and secreting them back to his “home” (a tank), his friendship with a never-say-die cockroach, or how he listens to a couple sing and dance in “Hello!Dolly”, WALL.E steals your heart.It is inquisitive as a child, sensitive as a human, and when it meets the robot of its dreams, shy as a boy just into his teens. WALL.E fumbles, faints, goes cross-eyed and weak in his knees at the first glance of the snow-white EVE. It’s art to convey that through a slight twist and turn of a rusted metal box, and art is what is on display here.The film does lose a little bit of its momentum when WALL.E and EVE go back to the spaceship Axiom where humans have been hiding out for 700 years. They have spent lifetimes in floating chairs, with everything at their voice’s command, getting their entertainment off screen floating along with them. As a result, the humans have lost the capacity to think, feel, decide and even walk (the bones have all dissolved to fat).The humans are the ones who are the machines in space, and it takes a robot they created to clean up their mess, to teach them a lesson in feeling.It does get a bit complicated and messy when robots in all shapes and sizes keep falling off shelves on the spaceship, but that’s not what you take back from the film. It’s the strength that’s packed in the plaintive cries with which WALL.E and EVE call out to each other, across space. Full marks to Ben Burtt and Elissa Knight (the voices of WALL.E and EVE), for never before has an entire love story been told in inflections of just one word.If Earth as a junkyard isn’t such an impossibility, who is to say that we can’t have a robot showing us the way?
