WALL-E (promoted with an interpunct as WALL·E) is a 2008 computer animated adventure comedy science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released to theaters by Walt Disney Pictures on June 27, 2008. WALL-E will be released onto DVD and Blu-ray on November 4, 2008. The film is directed by Andrew Stanton, who previously directed Finding Nemo. It follows a romance between two robots in the future. Most of the characters do not have human voices, instead communicating with body language and sounds (designed by Ben Burtt) that resemble voices. It is also the first animated feature by Pixar to have several segments featuring live action characters. The film has received almost universal praise from film critics.

In 2108, the megacorporation Buy 'n Large took over every service on Earth, including the government. Overrun by consumerism, the planet eventually became so heavily polluted that it could no longer support life. In an attempt to keep humanity alive, Buy 'n Large sponsored an exodus to space aboard hundreds of massive "Executive Starliners", the largest of which is the Axiom. Thousands of WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) units were left behind to clean up the planet. However, seven hundred years later, only one WALL-E (Ben Burtt) remains operational, scavenging parts from his inactive duplicates. The planet is still covered in trash, only arranged in neat piles. After centuries of living in micro-gravity (it was originally supposed to be five years), the humans aboard the Axiom have lost considerable bone and muscle mass, rendering them too obese and weak to stand or move without robotic assistance. Every task is now automated, including piloting the ship, which is handled by the autopilot AUTO (voiced by the program MacInTalk).

WALL-E's centuries of prolonged activation have caused him to develop a personality. He collects items that he finds among the refuse and adopts a cockroach as a pet. He constantly watches a videotape of the 1969 movie Hello, Dolly! on an old iPod magnified through a Fresnel lens, especially the performances of "Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment". It teaches him emotion, particularly holding hands (which becomes a recurring theme). He also finds and saves a seedling plant, placing it in an old boot. One day, he meets EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, Elissa Knight), a robot from the Axiom sent to Earth to find plant life. He falls in love with her, but despite his best efforts, her only concern is for her directive. When WALL-E shows her the plant he found, she stores the plant inside herself and deactivates. WALL-E goes to great lengths to protect her body until EVE and her plant cargo are retrieved by the ship that delivered her. Distraught, WALL-E clings to the outer hull as it departs.

Aboard the Axiom, WALL-E follows EVE to her destination. His peculiar behavior causes both humans and robots to act outside their normal routine. In particular, WALL-E causes an M-O (Microbe Obliterator) model cleaning robot to leave its designated path to obsessively clean the filth WALL-E leaves in his wake, and inadvertently awakens two humans, John and Mary, to the world around them and each other.

EVE tries to present the plant to Captain B. McCrea (Jeff Garlin), but it is missing. AUTO tells the captain that EVE has malfunctioned, and sends her to the robot repair ward with WALL-E. Mistakenly thinking that diagnostic machine is trying to hurt her, WALL-E takes EVE's gun arm and accidentally frees all the malfunctioning robots. In her attempt to get the arm back, she and WALL-E are labeled as rogue robots. EVE tries to send WALL-E back to Earth in an escape pod, but he refuses to go. AUTO's assistant, GO-4, arrives carrying the missing plant, which he attempts to dispose of in the escape pod. WALL-E manages to save the plant and EVE returns it to McCrea. Curious to see images of Earth, he projects EVE's security camera footage, where she sees the lengths that WALL-E went to protect her. The captain is shocked by the environmental devastation on Earth depicted in the recordings and decides they must return to make amends.

When AUTO insists that they cannot return to Earth, he is forced to reveal that Buy 'n Large ordered the autopilots to never return to Earth, having deemed it too toxic to ever support life again. Unable to disobey the order, AUTO locks the captain in his quarters and tries to dispose of the plant. He severely damages WALL-E and deactivates EVE, throwing them and the plant into a garbage chute. EVE awakens and searches in vain for parts to repair WALL-E, even dismissing her directive to do so. WALL-E presents the plant, which will bring them back to Earth where he can be fixed. They recruit the malfunctioning robots and fight their way back to the main part of the ship. They are aided by the captain, who hotwires the operating systems. He tells WALL-E and EVE to put the plant on the holo-detector, a pedestal that rises from the floor on one of the passenger decks. The captain and AUTO have a brief battle, which causes the ship to turn on its side and pile the immobile humans in the corner. While EVE protects the humans from the vehicles falling towards them, AUTO forces the holo-detector back into the floor. WALL-E uses his body to jam it open, which crushes him. McCrea stands up by himself (to the amazement of the passengers) and deactivates AUTO, restoring order aboard the ship. Once the plant is in the holo-detector, the ship's hyperjump back to Earth is initiated. WALL-E's crushed body runs out of charge and shuts down.

Once they arrive on Earth, EVE frantically repairs WALL-E. However, the extent of the repairs seems to have wiped his memory and personality: he begins crushing his treasured knick-knacks into cubes, following his original directive. EVE's attempts to make him remember prove useless, so as a parting gesture she takes hold of his hand and leans her head towards his. A static discharge (a "kiss") jumps between the two. WALL-E's memory reboots and he suddenly recognizes her as they clasp hands. With a renewed sense of purpose, humanity and robots begin working together to restore Earth's biosphere.

Ben Burtt as sound technician for WALL-E, the main character of the film. He is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class unit, a mobile trash compactor and the last in a massive line created by the Buy 'n Large corporation to gather and compact the waste created by the humans that utilized their products. WALL-E is solar-powered, and the Mac classic start-up sound is used to indicate a full charge. WALL-E's long and lonely life has granted him sentience and emotion. His loneliness is soon requited via EVE, an evaluation robot that comes to Earth searching for signs of life, but finds a new and somewhat bizarre companion as well.

Elissa Knight as EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a sleek, ergonomically advanced robotic probe whose main function is to locate plant life in order to determine if the Earth is capable of supporting human life. She is modeled after the sleek, white versions of most Apple, Inc. products, and is equipped with scanners as well as a retractable plasma blaster in her right arm. Although EVE at first appears to be a no-nonsense, stoic robot, upon meeting WALL-E, she soon begins to show signs of light-heartedness, even if his antics do annoy her from time to time.

Jeff Garlin as Axiom Captain B. McCrea.

Fred Willard as Shelby Forthright, BNL CEO. Willard is the only cast member in this film who plays a live-action character with a speaking role. His plans to make human life more comfortable and convenient for them using robots starts off prosperous, but through the reveal near the middle of the film, he realizes he was mistaken and orders the autopilots of the spaceship not to return to Earth.

Ben Burtt as the sound engineer for M-O, one of the maintenance robots built by the Axiom who cleans the filth around the ship, and inspects incoming shipments for foreign contaminants. M-O is annoyed by the amount of filth on WALL-E, and learns to act of his own accord just to follow after WALL-E in an attempt to clean him. M-O's "Foreign Contaminant" warning is created using PlainTalk.

John Ratzenberger as John

Kathy Najimy as Mary

Sigourney Weaver as the Ship's Computer. Weaver's casting was a nod to the Alien films.

MacInTalk sounds were used for AUTO. Burtt originally wanted to use old Maritime military sounds for the character. AUTO is the AXIOM's internal autopilot, built into the ship's steering wheel. He has a single, HAL-like eye. He serves as the antagonist of the film. His role has been the same since the AXIOM's first captain: maintain Directive A113 at all costs, which is to ensure that the ship never returns to Earth. Upon discovering a small plant retrieved by EVE, AUTO realizes that this would break the prime Buy 'n Large directive, and does everything in his power to make sure he remains the sole and primary caregiver of the human race, regardless of it being the best choice for them.

Andrew Stanton conceived WALL-E before Toy Story was made: the idea was, "What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?" Pete Docter developed the film for two months in 1995, after Stanton explained the story to him, but he decided to make Monsters, Inc. (2001) instead, as he was unsure of telling a love story. The idea continued to preoccupy Stanton, because of his love of space opera and personifying inanimate objects.

After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt they "had really achieved the physics of believing you were really under water, so I said 'Hey, let’s do that with air.' Let’s fix our lenses, let’s get the depth of field looking exactly how anamorphic lenses work and do all these tricks that make us have the same kind of dimensionality that we got on Nemo with an object out in the air and on the ground.'" Producer Jim Morris added that the film was animated so that it would feel "as if there really was a cameraman". Dennis Muren was hired to advise Pixar on replicating science fiction films from the 1960s and 1970s, including elements such as 70 mm frames, barrel distortion and lens flare. Scale models were made for Muren, which he used to teach Pixar.

The design of the robots came about by Stanton telling his designers, "See it as an appliance first, and then read character into it." In creating the title character, the animators were inspired by a pair of binoculars and Luxo Jr., the lamp featured in the Pixar logo. Stanton was playing with a pair of binoculars, which looked happy or sad depending on whether they were upside down or not. Stanton felt "you don't need a mouth, you don't need a nose, you get a whole personality just from [the eyes]", which meant the audience would feel he is "not just a human in a robot shell". WALL-E's body came from the logic of having his body curl up like a turtle and tank treads that would allow him to overcome any terrain. The director also acknowledged he may have been subconsciously influenced by Johnny 5 from the film Short Circuit (which he saw once).

Stanton pitched the story to Ben Burtt who signed on to do the sound design. There is little traditional dialogue in the film; Stanton joked, "I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie", in reference to Burtt's work on Star Wars. To create dialogue, Burtt took various mechanical sounds, and combined them to resemble dialogue. When WALL-E recharges his battery by means of solar energy, he makes the same startup chime as the recent Macintosh computers. Executive producer John Lasseter said of the film's lack of dialogue that "the art of animation is about what the character does, not what it says. It all depends on how you tell the story, whether it has a lot of dialogue or not."

As Cars was dedicated to the memory of Joe Ranft, WALL-E was dedicated to Justin Wright (1981-2008), a Pixar animator who had worked on Ratatouille. In the Pixar tradition, a list of "Production Babies" was included in the closing credits. Currently, WALL-E holds the record for the highest production budget of any Pixar film at $180 million.

Pixar films often contain references to the studio's other projects. When WALL-E builds a small statue of EVE, one of the arms is a signiture Luxo-style lamp. EVE scans a Pizza Planet truck from Toy Story. A dusty Rex, from Toy Story, appears on WALL-E's conveyor belt of junk (between two bowling pins). There is a Hamm toy, from Toy Story as well, on the conveyor belt of junk later in the movie. A toy of Mike from Monsters, Inc. also appears on this conveyor belt. When WALL-E settles down for the night with his cockroach pal at the beginning of the film, on top of the shelf above him is a Frozone bobble head from The Incredibles. During the closing credits, a mosaic version of a sea turtle from Finding Nemo appears. A113, a phrase that has been put into every Pixar film to date, is an important code in the movie. John Ratzenberger also voices one of the characters, as he has done for every full-length Pixar release.

The soundtrack was released on June 24, 2008. The album features "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment" by Michael Crawford -- from Hello, Dolly!, and "La Vie en Rose" by Louis Armstrong, and "Down to Earth" by Peter Gabriel. The music was mainly composed by Thomas Newman with orchestration credit to Carl Johnson, JAC Redford, Thomas Pasatieri, and Gary K. Thomas.

The film received its premiere at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on June 23, 2008. WALL-E opened in wide release in the United States and Canada on June 27, 2008 and grossed $23.1 million in its opening day. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $63 million in 3,992 theaters, ranking #1 at the box office. The opening weekend would give the film the third-best opening weekend for a Pixar film.

Continuing a Pixar tradition, WALL-E was paired with a short film for its theatrical release. The attached film was Presto.

WALL-E received near-universal acclaim from film critics. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 96% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based upon a sample of 166 reviews, with an average rating of 8.6/10. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 93, based on 37 reviews.

Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film "Pixar's ninth consecutive wonder", saying it was imaginative yet straightforward. Citing WALL-E's "adroit" borrowing from other works, McCarthy said it pushed the boundaries of animation in managing to balance esoteric ideas with more immediately accessible ones, and that the main difference between the film and other science fiction projects rooted in an apocalypse was its optimism. McCarthy also had praise for Thomas Newman's musical score and the visuals, for which he cited cinematographer Roger Deakins' input as a visual consultant as a possible factor.

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter declared that WALL-E surpassed the achievements of Pixar's previous eight features, saying that the film had the "heart, soul, spirit and romance" of the best silent films. He said that the filmmakers managed to tell a terrific story through visual and aural ideas which enabled the robotic characters to convey "a rainbow of emotions". He said the visuals were arguably Pixar's best and praised the creation of a ruined Earth city and a human spaceship as "fantastically imaginative". Honeycutt said the film's definitive stroke of brilliance was in using a mix of archive film footage and computer graphics to trigger WALL-E's romantic leanings. He praised Burtt's sound design, saying "If there is such a thing as an aural sleight of hand, this is it." Honeycutt concluded by saying that despite the film's acknowledged nods to other works (2001: A Space Odyssey, and moments where robots "run riot" bringing to mind Monsters, Inc.), WALL-E could be Pixar's most original work to date.

Roger Ebert writing in the Chicago Sun-Times said WALL-E succeeded in three areas: as "an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment, and a decent science-fiction story". Ebert said the scarcity of dialogue would allow it to "cross language barriers" in a manner appropriate to the global theme, and he had praise for the visual effects, saying the color palette was "bright and cheerful... and a little bit realistic". He cited early Disney animations that successfully translated human expressions onto non-human characters as an influence on the title character. He said the film managed to generate a "curious" regard for the WALL-E, comparing his design ("rusty and hard-working and plucky") favorably to more obvious attempts at creating "lovable" lead characters. Ebert called the storytelling "enchanting" and said the film could be enjoyed by adults and children alike. He said WALL-E was concerned with ideas rather than spectacle, saying it may require "a little thought" on the part of the audience, and that this could be particularly stimulating to younger viewers.

The film was interpreted as tackling a topical, ecologically minded agenda. Todd McCarthy said it did so with a lightness of touch that granted the viewer the ability to accept or ignore the message. Jessica Jensen of The Huffington Post, while praising the film overall, felt it did not make enough of a point with its environmental themes. She suggested it should have had environmental advice or a website link during the end credits, adding it was "troubling" that by the end "humans return to Earth and it seems as if everything will just be hunky-dory". The film's ecological theme was criticized by conservative commentators such as CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck, and contributors for National Review Online; Shannen W. Coffin said that the film was "leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind", and Jonah Goldberg wrote that he agreed with the charges of hypocrisy and "Malthusian fear mongering" leveled at the film by others, but said that it was "fascinating" and occasionally "brilliant".

Patrick J. Ford of The American Conservative said WALL-E's conservative critics were missing lessons in the film that he felt were appealing to traditional conservatism. He argued that the mass consumerism in the film wasn't shown to be a product of big business, but of too close a tie between big business and big government: "The government unilaterally provided its citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall." Responding to Coffin's claim that the film points out the "evils of mankind", he argued the only evils depicted were those that resulted from "losing touch with our own humanity" and that fundamental conservative representations such as the farm, the family unit and "wholesome" entertainment were in the end held aloft by the human characters. He concluded, "By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice." Andrew Stanton commented on the reaction to the environmental themes by denying an intentional ecological message, saying that people were making connections that he "never saw coming." He said the circumstances of humanity's abandoning the Earth arose merely as a way of telling the story, "reverse-engineered" from the initial concept of using refuse as both a visual shorthand that would be easy for children to understand, and as a way of depicting the title character as holding a low-status, menial job.

Kyle Smith, author and columnist for the New York Post, wrote that in depicting humans of the future as "a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk", WALL-E was darker and more cynical than any major Disney cartoon he could think of. He added, "I'm also not sure I've ever seen a major corporation spend so much money to issue an insult to its customers." Maura Judkis of U.S. News & World Report questioned whether this depiction of "frighteningly obese humans" would resonate with children, making them more likely to "play outside rather than in front of the computer, to avoid a similar fate". Stanton denied that his intention was to pass comment on obesity, saying the purpose was instead to portray human overdependency.

WALL-E is the only one still truly living. And what is the ultimate purpose of living? To love. And WALL-E falls head over heels with a robot named EVE. Now, Wall-E’s feelings aren’t reciprocated because, well, she has no feelings. She’s a robot, cold and clinical. WALL-E is the one who has evolved over time and garnered feelings. So in the end, it’s gonna be WALL-E’s pursuit to win EVE’s heart, and his unique appreciation of life to become mankind’s last hope to rediscover its roots. In short, it’s going to take a robot's love to help make the world go round."
— Andrew Stanton