Key figures: Andrew Stanton (director and co-writer), Jim Reardon (co-writer), Pete Docter (co-story), Jim Morris (producer), Ben Burtt (sound designer and voice of WALL-E), Thomas Newman (composer)
Summary
WALL-E is an animated science-fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures and released in the United States and Canada on June 27, 2008. It was directed by Andrew Stanton, who wrote the screenplay with Jim Reardon from a story he developed with Pete Docter, and produced by Jim Morris. The film is set in the year 2805 on an Earth that humanity has abandoned and buried in refuse, where a solitary waste-compacting robot — Waste Allocation Load-Lifter: Earth-class, or WALL-E — has continued its cleanup duties alone for centuries. WALL-E’s routine is interrupted by the arrival of EVE, a sleek probe sent to search for renewed plant life; when EVE recovers a living seedling, WALL-E follows her across space to the starship Axiom, where the surviving humans live a sedentary, screen-bound existence.
The film is distinguished by its largely dialogue-free first act, which conveys character and story through pantomime, robotic gesture, and sound. Ben Burtt, the sound designer best known for Star Wars, created roughly 2,500 sounds for the production and supplied the electronic voices of the title robot and EVE. Thomas Newman composed the score, and Peter Gabriel co-wrote and performed the end-credits song “Down to Earth.” The production cost an estimated $180 million.
WALL-E was both a commercial and critical success. It opened at number one at the North American box office with about $63 million on its opening weekend and went on to gross approximately $223.8 million in the United States and Canada and around $308.7 million internationally, for a worldwide total of roughly $532.5 million — among the year’s ten highest-grossing films. At the 81st Academy Awards, held in February 2009, it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and received five additional nominations, including for Original Screenplay, Original Score, and Original Song. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
Significance
WALL-E was widely praised as one of Pixar’s most ambitious works and is frequently cited among the finest animated films of its era. Its near-silent opening reel — sustained character storytelling with minimal dialogue — was an unusual gamble for a major studio family film and drew comparisons to silent-era cinema and the visual comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The film paired this craft with pointed themes: rampant consumerism, corporate homogenization, environmental decay, and the physical and social atrophy of a humanity insulated by technology. These ideas gave the film an unusual thematic weight for an animated feature aimed in part at children, and they fueled extensive cultural commentary about sustainability and screen-dependent life. As the second consecutive Pixar film to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar after Ratatouille, WALL-E reinforced the studio’s standing at the forefront of feature animation and demonstrated that a computer-animated film could combine mass appeal with formal experimentation and social critique.