I Am Very, Very Excited . . .

This is getting to sound like a broken record: Pixar Animation Studios has just topped itself. Again.

The film is so clever and sophisticated that you worry, slightly, that it might be too clever to connect with mainstream audiences. But like those worries last year that having a rat for a hero in "Ratatouille" might throw off audiences, surely "WALL-E" will make that connection. It's so sweet and funny that the multitudes undoubtedly will surrender to its many charms.

-Hollywood Reporter

The engaging and visually stunning computer-animated WALL·E (* * * * out of four) is a significant departure for the studio, with its sci-fi plot and soundtrack of beeps and buzzes that serve as communication between the bots.
WALL·E is at once futuristic, funny and fantastical. It's an extraordinarily captivating adventure, laden with equal parts humor and heart and populated with memorable and endearing characters.

-USA Today

EVERY time I think the studio that gave us "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille" can't possibly top itself, Pixar comes up with a masterpiece like "WALL-E," which smuggles barbed political satire into a charming, hilarious robot love story aimed at the entire family.

-New York Post

Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate—and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth.

But WALL-E will not be remembered by children–or the adults for whom WALL-E is really intended–for its tsk-tsking environmental policy or its Naomi Klein polemics. Rather, you’ll adore it because of a cuddly, lonely little robot who breaks your beeping heart.

-Village Voice

The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E— in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen — is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in. The scene is an intricately rendered city, bristling with skyscrapers but bereft of any inhabitants apart from a battered, industrious robot and his loyal cockroach sidekick. Hazy, dust-filtered sunlight illuminates a landscape of eerie, post-apocalyptic silence. This is a world without people, you might say without animation, though it teems with evidence of past life.

-New York Times

IF Pixar Animation Studios has an enviable record of consistent success -- and with a worldwide box-office gross of $4.3 billion from its eight films, it certainly does -- it's because the company has an uncanny gift for pushing things further without pushing too far. Pixar's adventurous new film, the one-of-a-kind "Wall-E," shows how it's done.

Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, "Wall-E" gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films. Directed by Pixar stalwart Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote and directed the Oscar-winning "Finding Nemo," "Wall-E" is the latest Pixar film to manage what's become next door to impossible for anyone else: appealing to the broadest possible audience without insulting anyone's intelligence.

-Los Angeles Times

Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart. I'm not sure I'd trust anyone, kid or adult, who didn't get a bit of a lump in the throat by the end of WALL-E, a film that brings off what the best (and only the best) Pixar films have: It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

-Entertainment Weekly

Pixar’s “WALL•E” succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story. After “Kung Fu Panda,” I thought I had just about exhausted my emergency supply of childlike credulity, but here is a film, like “Finding Nemo,” that you can enjoy even if you’ve grown up. That it works largely without spoken dialogue is all the more astonishing; it can easily cross language barriers, which is all the better, considering that it tells a planetary story.

-Roger Ebert

It is, the more I think about it, a jewel of a film in conception, execution and message. But the kids, who had been laughing at a recent screening, got very quiet during certain sequences, especially when the Earth seemed irredeemable. "WALL-E's" glance into the future didn't do much for my bliss either, but the idea that a company in the business of mainstream entertainment would make something as creative, substantial and cautionary as "WALL-E" has to raise your hopes for humanity.

-Washington Post