'WALL-E'

Rating:

BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

June 27, 2008

I can admit it: "Wall-E," the new animated film from Pixar, had me a little misty-eyed. Lumpy in the throat, even. Smiling through tears like an audience member at an "Oprah" taping.

And that was just in the first five minutes.

That's no small feat, considering "WALL-E," whose hero is a trash-compacting robot, has essentially no dialogue for its first 30 minutes. But even when humans show up and the words flow, this computer-generated cartoon conveys its strongest emotions - loneliness, happiness, joy, love - with poignantly small gestures and delightfully inventive slapstick. Like Charlie Chaplin's best silents - a clear influence - "WALL-E" is pure visual magic. As a bonus, it packs a wicked satirical punch.

It opens on a wasted wonderland of garbage - an abandoned Earth - one of several dazzling panoramas from director and co-writer Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo"). For 700 years, little WALL-E, formally known as Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class, has been motoring around on rickety treads, dutifully squeezing trash into neat cubes. He's become creative, too, building veritable Machu Picchus of junk. He's also grown sentimental, repeatedly watching a salvaged VHS copy of "Hello, Dolly." As that 1969 musical flickers in WALL-E's droopy binocular eyes, they reflect his deep yearning for companionship.

He gets it with the sudden arrival of an Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, or EVE. She's a beaut: egg-shaped, gleaming white, with shimmering blue eyes (and a mean laser). WALL-E longs to clasp her streamlined flipper, but EVE's response is chilly: "Classified." She's emotionally unavailable, though that will change.

It turns out that humans still exist, and in a form you might recognize. Force-fed junk-food on a mammoth cruise ship run by a galactic conglomerate ("Buy n Large"), they've evolved into morbidly obese, larval sloths barely able to walk. Slyly, "WALL-E" slides from a charming comedy into a merciless spoof, complete with Fred Willard as a glad-handing liar of a president. It will be up to EVE and WALL-E to help the humans find a new life on Earth.

But it's the two robots who seem most human of all. Their final scene together is as heart-piercing as "Casablanca" or "City Lights." Just with circuitboards. Elissa Knight, Fred Willard

(4 STARS) (G)

PLOT A lonely robot finds love, and a higher purpose.

CAST Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Fred Willard

LENGTH 1:37 minutes

PLAYING AT Area theaters.

BOTTOM LINE Absolutely magical.

Wall-to-wall robotic celebs

"WALL-E" comes from a long line of movie and TV robots, including:

Robby the Robot: Danger, Will Robinson! The iconic, 7-foot-2 Robby appeared first in the pioneering MGM film "Forbidden Planet" (1956) and later in episodes of "The Twilight Zone," "Lost in Space" and even "Gilligan's Island."

Rosie the Robot Maid: Bug-eyed, aproned and long-suffering, Rosie pampered "The Jetsons" during their 1962-63 run on television.

Huey, Dewey and Louie: Named after Donald Duck's nephews, these silent 'bots from the 1972 cult film "Silent Running" may be WALL-E's distant cousins. Homely but cuddly, they helped botanist Bruce Dern water the plants in his space-station greenhouse.

R2D2 and C3PO: The chirpy domehead and his gold-plated buddy from 1977's "Star Wars" may be the most famous movie robots of all time.

Bumblebee: One of the stars of "Transformers" (2007), this li'l fella morphed into a 1976 Chevy Camaro - the perfect Autobot for a teenage Shia LaBeouf.