New in movie theaters is Wall-E. The company left behind an army of WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class) robots to pick up all the trash, compress it into cubes and clean things up enough so that the human population, currently living on a distant spaceship, can return. Pixar’s new film, “Wall-E,” concerns a robot collecting garbage on an abandoned earth. As the film tells it, humans abandoned Earth sometime around 2010 when the planet became uninhabitable due to mounds and mounds of waste from consumer goods purchased from the gigantic megastore BnL (which, wittily, stands for Buy ’n Large).
While the film’s most daring gambits pay off in full, the inclusion of a standard outwit-the-bad-guys storyline dulls the magic that WALL-E so often achieves. And — oh, yeah — it has no dialogue for its first 30 minutes. Pixar is at it again! Wall-E sure to be a big hit. Seven hundred years later, our hero is the only WALL-E left, with only a cockroach and an old videotape of Hello, Dolly! for company.
WALL-E (voiced by sound wizard Ben Burtt) collects shiny and unusual objects — and repairs himself with parts scavenged from his fallen brethren — but he is alone in all the world. One of its characters is a cockroach. (He has a soft spot for Put On Your Sunday Clothes, and the love song It Only Takes a Moment makes him long to one day be able to hold someone’s hand. No one can accuse Pixar Animation of not taking big risks with its latest feature WALL-E, which tells a love story between two robots (who speak three words between them) against the backdrop of an Earth that’s been destroyed by waste and consumerist overkill.