The last born of the union between Disney and Pixar is one of the small goggle-eyed robots, created to clean Earth out while humans (North Americans) have gone on a long term waste-free space cruise. But in 700 years, Mankind has forgotten about their home planet, and turned to artificial intelligence to master daily life: sleeping, autotransporting and feeding themselves in armchairs.

Meanwhile, Wall-E has learned how to survive and regenerate himself and developped a personnality, and a taste for human paraphernalia and corny broadway musicals, which makes him crave company. When a female probe robot is sent by humans in search of signs of life on Earth, it’s a new world of emotion for Wall-E and the beginning of a challenging trip back to their roots for Humans.

Underneath Wall-E’s touching and simple romantic story (that the lack of words makes easily accessible to the littlest ones), lies another of Pixar’s sharp and non complacent critique of American civilization, which refined A.I to ease their brains into the lowest level of activity, and become a nation of overweight couch potatoes. And let’s not forget all the ironic hints, from the worry of being sanethized, and cleaned by robots: what’s foreign has to be decontaminated, to medias that are feeding the populace with fake truths, when the situation is more serious than what they let appear, and the tendancy to uniformisation, with the provocative choice of the (communist) red as the colour to wear, a satire to imply the US are becoming what they chastize...

As the humans seemingly turn to computers, the robots show human reactions, organisation and lives. When the humans let go of their instincts and seem incapable of thinking for themselves without having everything predetermined for them, the robots appear to be the only ones able to improvise and aware of the consequences.

The satiric tone gets softened down by a few poetic and tenderly funny gems that Pixar is so gifted at bringing us: like the two robots dancing in among the stars, with Wall-E propulsed by a fire extinguisher.

After Cars, where a freeway had meant the touristic and economic death of a town, Pixar is continuing their warning against the abuse of thoughtless modernisation, now highlighting the paradox in having robots showing us the way back to natural life.

A word has to be mentioned about the Disney’s short film before the feature, which is going back to Disney’s clever and character-driven comedy style... as enjoyable as the feature you’ve paid to watch.