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According to its early trailers, Wall*E was conceived at the same Pixar lunch that gave us Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc.—some of the best animated features ever produced. Wall*E, however, may be the best of the lot. It’s as sweet and heartfelt as previous Pixar films, and maybe their most daring.

The titular Wall*E is a small trash-compacting robot left on Earth by humans in search of greener, less polluted pastures. He spends his days building skyscrapers of little trash cubes and collecting knickknacks for his home inside a transport truck. A cockroach is his only companion, and not a very good one: Wall*E spends his nights watching Hello Dolly! and dreaming of a companion to hold hands with.

A companion arrives in the form of Eve, a slick, white, raindrop-shaped robot dropped off by a spaceship of unknown origin. She’s scanning the arid wastelands for something confidential. Wall*E spies her zipping across the landscape and falls in love.

The story takes twists and turns from that point, but those are better left as surprises, which may reveal something about the relative sparseness of Pixar’s trailers. Their trailers are almost universally weak, introducing a general concept and revealing little of the story or the leads in them, but now I think I know why: they want their movies to unfold naturally. They want the audience to discover the people and events organically, experiencing them as more a slice of life… less a series of story beats to be fulfilled.

Where the movie really shines—and where it is most daring—is in the two leads. Most of Wall*E is completely free of dialogue, leaving the robots and others to express themselves entirely in body language. Wall*E, a perpetual klutz, comes to resemble the lovable losers of the silent-film era. The opening cartoon, “Presto,” sets the tone for a more expressive, less verbal kind of storytelling. I’ve heard some questions about whether kids will be entertained by a mostly speech-free movie. I don’t think we need to worry.

So much of the story is carried on the physical expressiveness of the characters, and Wall*E and Eve are up to the task. They are some of the most endearing characters to grace the screen in some time. It’s amazing what those eyes can do with a subtle shift or sag.

Also daring is Pixar’s choice to create a story with genuine tension and adversity, but without any clear villain. There are only human (and robot) foibles to contend with. The movie’s most uncomfortable and spot-on commentaries come packaged with a soft satirical edge: Every scrap of junk left on this wasteland planet is marked with the Buy N’ Large brand, an all-encompassing big store-corporate entity whose CEO was also president of the world at the time of humanity’s exodus. This is a society that was literally buried under its rampant consumerism.

But Wall*E is not interested in pointing fingers or laying blame. This is a movie that celebrates cooperation, loyalty, creativity and a love for life. As with almost all previous Pixar movies, Wall*E is equally engaging to adults and children alike. Pixar is one of the few studios left that knows “family film” does not mean “dumb.” And, as usual, there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

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