Wall-E (U)

Not much more than a decade since it first made CGI waves in mainstream cinema, the name Pixar has become one of that rarest modern movie commodities – a guarantee of quality.

You would hope the animation studio’s roll call of near back-to-back classic features would prompt much hand-wringing and scalp-scratching elsewhere in Hollywood, but if so there has been precious little sign that other studios are doing much to up their game.

And so, despite an over-saturated CG-animated market, the field is once again left wide open for Pixar to win the hearts and minds of the summer movie-going crowd.

Wall-E (U) is its latest film to be roundly proclaimed a masterpiece and ‘even better than the last one’. That’s going a bit far perhaps. Personally, I would still put the two Toy Stories and Finding Nemo at the top of the Pixar table.

But there’s not a huge amount in it, and it says something when your one acknowledged misfire is the still nonetheless entertaining Cars.

Having done toys, insects, monsters, fish, superheroes, cars and rats so far, robots seemed one of the few remaining objects to receive the anthropomorphically cute makeover.

Its parable-simple tale charts the adventures of a lonely worker robot, the last to be left activated on a desolate, dustbowl Earth, all but destroyed by the humans who have long-since abandoned it since ridding it of organic life.

This is Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), a solar-powered rubbish-collecting droid whose sole companion is an ultra-resilient cockroach and a copy of the musical Hello Dolly!

He is at once a sad and comic figure, whose accident-prone ways come across like a futuristic Buster Keaton. His life of unknowingly pointless routine is disrupted one day by the dramatic arrival of a sleek, sexy search robot Eve (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) sent down to scour the raddled planet for life.

And it is from the point these two meet that the core of this film is established, as a futuristic love story between machines.

Naturally the plot develops beyond this point, in fact turning out to be distinctly political for Pixar, or in fact any kids’ animation bar The Simpsons.

Functioning as a kind of tween Ballardian satire, it portrays a spacebound future human race as a horrible breed of docile blimps, nearcrippled and lobotomised by centuries of overloaded consumer excess.

These grown-up Cabbage Patch-kids whirl around on mobility scooters, lost in a world of liquid junk food and computer screen link-ups. It’s quite a surprise to see this kind of pointed satire in a kids film – and quite refreshing too if it weren’t for the fact that such merchandise-driven films help contribute to these problems.

The story seems to lose some of its charm once outside the Earth’s satellite-cluttered orbit. The makers have worked hard to show the robots in a sympathetic light, but for all their efforts there is still a slight nagging lack of anything recognisably human or Earth-like to latch onto. The result is almost too alienating.

Wall-E’s speech has been described as a cross between ET and R2-D2, while his appearance is similar to Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, but with binocular eyes. His air of forlorn solitude recalls the robots in eco-SF weepie Silent Running.

It’s something that gets mentioned with each new Pixar film, too, but this one really has again upped the wow factor with its final look. Some of the early scenes are impossible to tell whether they are animated or real.

The sound effects team should be in line for Oscars, too, with an inspired use of blips and clunks to convey emotion. Not the best Pixar, maybe, but parents will still likely find themselves scrabbling for the dolls and more of tomorrow’s rubbish come Christmas.