A small trash-compacting robot on an empty Earth. Pixar's most courageous opening act and one of the great love stories of 21st-century animation.
Seven hundred years from now, Earth has been abandoned. WALL·E — Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class — is the last of his line, a small box-bodied robot who has spent centuries alone compacting humanity's garbage into towers taller than skyscrapers. He has developed a personality. He collects objects. He plays a worn-out Betamax of Hello, Dolly!.
A sleek white probe named EVE lands. WALL·E falls in love. EVE finds a living plant, returns to her ship, and WALL·E follows — into space, onto the Axiom, the luxury cruise liner where the surviving humans have been drifting in obesity and comfort for centuries. The film becomes a different film in its second half. It is still, at its centre, about two robots and a plant.
WALL·E's first act has almost no dialogue. Just a small robot on an abandoned Earth, going about his routine, returning at sunset to a storage container he has decorated. The sound design is Ben Burtt — the man who designed R2-D2's voice and the lightsaber hum — and what he gives WALL·E is a vocabulary of beeps, mechanical sighs, and the small rattles of a body that's been working too long.
Pixar pitched a near-silent feature to Disney and Disney let them make it. It is hard to overstate how unusual that decision was. Pixar built credit during the 1995–2007 run that allowed Andrew Stanton this swing, and the swing connects: the opening sequence is arguably the most emotionally complete short film embedded in a feature in the studio's history.
When the action moves to the Axiom, the film changes tone. It becomes broader, more conventionally plotted, with humans who are physically depicted as overweight and dependent on motorised chairs. Some readings — at the time and since — have found the satire of these humans uncomfortably close to fat-shaming.
The more generous reading, and the one Stanton has consistently offered, is that the humans on the Axiom aren't being mocked for their bodies; they're being depicted as people who haven't been allowed to move, look up, or talk to each other in five centuries because a corporation organised their lives for profit. The film's villain, Auto, is an automated autopilot serving a 700-year-old corporate directive. WALL·E is not satirising obese people; it's satirising a system that produces them.
WALL·E and EVE communicate through trills, gestures, and a held hand. Their love story is built almost entirely from animation — body language, lens flares, the way EVE waits for WALL·E to catch up. It is one of the few mainstream films in which the central romance is between characters who cannot say 'I love you' and don't need to.
Pixar's animators studied silent-era performers — particularly Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin — for the visual storytelling. The influence is direct and visible.