Film Footle: WALL-E

Pixar is, very likely, my favourite company in the whole world. From the heights of Toy Story to the not-quite brilliant but still exceedingly watchable Ratatouille, they have never produced a dud. Some have been three star wonders, others have zoomed straight to five. WALL-E is one of the latter.

I'm going to hold back from saying that it's as good as Toy Story because I do think WALL-E slightly suffers from a lack of truly coherent storyline. But in terms of characterisation, watchability, animation and heart without sentiment, it's up there with the very best.

At some point in our future, the Earth has become so clogged with pollution that people have taken to five-year cruises aboard luxury spaceships where their every whim is catered for. WALL-E clean up bots are deployed to clean up the mess in the meantime. Some 700 years later, Earth is still uninhabitable, and a single bot remains, accompanied by a near-indestructible cockroach and blithely going about his duty whilst constructing a personal archive of any interesting bits and bobs (lighters, Rubik's Cubes and old VCRs of Hello Dolly, for example) that he comes across.

WALL-E's world is shaken by the arrival of a probe bot named Eve, whose job it is to find evidence of continued life on Earth. A slightly daft but likeable storyline about rogue computers and spaceship captains ensues but at this point any plot could take over and you'd still enjoy the spectacle.

What really marks WALL-E out from other animated films of a similar type is the lack of dialogue. Between them, the two main characters are capable of voicing only five words, and with these, and gesture, they conduct their love story. Eve's expressions are limited to what her blue-lit eyes can show. WALL-E has a whole battery of screws and joints to employ, and the Pixar animators make the most of each and every one to show him in love, trembling in fear, questioning, being determined and going about his daily business. The range of movement given to this unquestionably adorable machine is really impressive given that he has none of the usual cute characteristics animators can exploit, such as Sulley's fluffy blue coat in Monsters, Inc.

For the first fifteen minutes or so of WALL-E, there is no dialogue at all. That sets the tone for a Chaplin-esque physical comedy, accompanied by some of the most deft and impressive animation of its kind (i.e. not hand drawn). Some in-jokes are dropped in for the wry laughs; for example, when WALL-E fully recharges the noise is that of an Apple computer waking up, and he watches films through an iPod. Personally, even though I have a Mac I love, I am more impressed with Steve Jobs for his founding of Pixar than any of his Apple legacy, and it provoked a wry snicker from me and a few other geeks in the audience. Much of the humour is soundly slapstick, of a very enjoyable type. The love story and the moral are both played out in a heartwarming way, lacking in cloying sentiment, which was thoroughly relieving.

Cute, funny, classily rendered and clever. You can't really ask for more than that, can you?