WALL-E

WALL-E (stylized with an interpunct as WALL·E) is a 2008 American animated romantic science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Andrew Stanton, produced by Jim Morris, and written by Stanton and Jim Reardon, based on a story by Stanton and Pete Docter. It stars the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver, with Fred Willard in a live-action role. The film follows a solitary robot named WALL-E on a future, uninhabitable, deserted Earth in 2805, left to clean up garbage. He is visited by a robot called EVE sent from the starship Axiom, with whom he falls in love and pursues across the galaxy.

After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt Pixar had created believable simulations of underwater physics and was willing to direct a film set largely in space. WALL-E has minimal dialogue in its early sequences; many of the characters in the film do not have voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds that were designed by Burtt. The film incorporates various topics including consumerism, corporatocracy, nostalgia, waste management, human environmental impact and concerns, obesity/sedentary lifestyles, and global catastrophic risk. It is also Pixar's first animated film with segments featuring live-action characters. Thomas Newman composed the film's musical score. The film cost $180 million to produce, a record-breaking sum for an animated film at the time. Following Pixar tradition, WALL-E was paired with a short film titled Presto for its theatrical release.

WALL-E premiered at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on June 23, 2008, and was released in the United States on June 27. The film received critical acclaim for its animation, story, voice acting, characters, visuals, score, sound design, screenplay, use of minimal dialogue, and scenes of romance. It was also commercially successful, grossing $521.3 million worldwide and becoming the ninth-highest grossing film of 2008. It won the 2008 Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film, the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation, the final Nebula Award for Best Script, the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with five additional Oscar nominations. The film was widely named by critics and organizations, including the National Board of Review and American Film Institute, as one of the best films of 2008, and is considered among the greatest animated films ever made.

In 2021, WALL-E became the second Pixar feature film (after Toy Story), as well as the fourth Pixar film overall, to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In September 2022, at the request of Stanton, Disney licensed WALL-E to The Criterion Collection, which re-released the film as a special edition 4K Blu-Ray-standard Blu-ray combo pack on November 22, 2022, marking the first Pixar film to ever receive such an honor.

In the 29th century, Earth is a garbage-strewn wasteland due to an ecocide caused by rampant consumerism, corporate greed, and environmental neglect. Humanity was evacuated to space by the megacorporation Buy n Large (BnL) on giant spaceships 700 years earlier, leaving trash-compacting robots to clean up the planet. All but one of the robots have stopped functioning; the last remaining active robot, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class), has developed a personality. WALL-E remains active by salvaging parts from inactive robots, with his pet cockroach Hal as his only companion.

One day, WALL-E's routine of compressing trash and collecting interesting objects is broken by the arrival of a robot called EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), which scans the planet for sustainable life. WALL-E is smitten by the sleek, futuristic robot, and the two begin to connect, until EVE goes into standby mode when WALL-E shows her his most recent find: a living seedling. EVE is collected by a large unmanned rocket; with WALL-E clinging on, it returns to its mothership, the starliner Axiom.

In the centuries since the Axiom left Earth, its passengers have degenerated into helpless obesity due to microgravity and laziness, with robots catering to their every whim. Captain B. McCrea sits back while his robotic AI autopilot helm, nicknamed AUTO, pilots the ship. McCrea is unprepared for the positive probe response, but discovers that placing the plant in the ship's Holo-Detector will trigger a hyperjump back to Earth so that humanity can begin recolonization. When McCrea inspects EVE's storage compartment, the plant is missing, and EVE blames WALL-E for its disappearance.

EVE is deemed faulty and taken to diagnostics. WALL-E intervenes and inadvertently releases the other faulty bots, causing him and EVE to be designated rogue robots. EVE tries sending WALL-E home in an escape pod, but the two witness McCrea's first mate robot, GO-4, stowing the plant in a pod set to self-destruct. WALL-E enters the pod to retrieve the plant just as it launches, and he and the plant survive the pod's destruction. EVE catches up to him and they reconcile, celebrating with a dance in space around the Axiom.

EVE brings the plant to McCrea, who watches her recordings of Earth, concluding that they must save it. AUTO reveals that secret no-return directive A113 orders them to not return to Earth, on account of toxicity levels making Earth unlivable. When McCrea tries overriding the directive, AUTO electrocutes WALL-E, throws WALL-E and EVE down a garbage chute, and confines McCrea to his quarters. EVE and WALL-E are nearly ejected into space with the Axiom's garbage, but cleaning robot Microbe Obliterator (M-O) inadvertently jams the airlock and rescues them.

As humans and robots help to secure the plant, McCrea and AUTO fight for control of the Axiom. AUTO crushes WALL-E using the Holo-Detector, but McCrea overpowers and deactivates AUTO. EVE inserts the plant into the Holo-Detector, initiating the hyperjump back to Earth.

Arriving on Earth, EVE repairs WALL-E, but his memory and personality have been erased. EVE gives WALL-E a goodbye "kiss", which releases a static electricity shock, restoring him. WALL-E and EVE reunite as the Axiom inhabitants take their first steps on Earth. Humans and robots work to restore the ravaged planet, and the plant grows into a tree, beneath which WALL-E and EVE rest.

As depicted in the teaser trailer, Andrew Stanton conceived WALL-E during a lunch with fellow writers John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft in 1994. Toy Story was near completion and the writers brainstormed ideas for their next projects—A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo—at this lunch. Stanton asked, "What if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?" Having struggled for many years with making the characters in Toy Story appealing, Stanton found his simple Robinson Crusoe-esque idea of a lonely robot on a deserted planet strong. Stanton made WALL-E a waste collector as the idea was instantly understandable, and because it was a low-status menial job that made him sympathetic. Stanton also liked the imagery of stacked cubes of garbage. He did not find the idea dark because having a planet covered in garbage was for him a childish imagining of disaster.

Stanton and Docter developed the film under the title of Trash Planet for two months in 1995, but they did not know how to develop the story and Docter chose to direct Monsters, Inc. instead. Stanton came up with the idea of WALL-E finding a plant, because his life as the sole inhabitant on a deserted world reminded Stanton of a plant growing among pavements. Before they turned their attention to other projects, Stanton and Lasseter thought about having WALL-E fall in love, as it was the necessary progression away from loneliness. Stanton started writing WALL-E again in 2002 while completing Finding Nemo. Stanton formatted his script in a manner reminiscent of Dan O'Bannon's Alien. O'Bannon wrote his script in a manner Stanton found reminded him of haiku, where visual descriptions were done in continuous lines of a few words. Stanton wrote his robot "dialogue" conventionally, but placed them in brackets. In late 2003, Stanton and a few others created a story reel of the first twenty minutes of the film. Lasseter and Steve Jobs were impressed and officially began development, though Jobs stated he did not like the title, originally spelled "W.A.L.-E."

While the first act of WALL-E "fell out of the sky" for Stanton, he had originally wanted aliens to plant EVE to explore Earth and the rest of the film was different. When WALL-E comes to the Axiom, he incites a Spartacus-style rebellion by the robots against the remnants of the human race, which were cruel alien Gels (completely devolved, gelatinous, boneless, legless, see-through, green creatures that resemble Jell-O). James Hicks, a physiologist, mentioned to Stanton the concept of atrophy and the effects prolonged weightlessness would have on humans living in space for an inordinately extended time period. Therefore, this was the inspiration of the humans degenerating into the alien Gels, and their ancestry would have been revealed in a Planet of the Apes-style ending. The Gels also spoke a made-up gibberish language, but Stanton scrapped this idea because he thought it would be too complicated for the audience to understand and they could easily be driven off from the storyline. The Gels had a royal family, who host a dance in a castle on a lake in the back of the ship, and the Axiom curled up into a ball when returning to Earth in this incarnation of the story. Stanton decided this was too bizarre and unengaging, and conceived humanity as "big babies". Stanton developed the metaphorical theme of the humans learning to stand again and "grow[ing] up", wanting WALL-E and EVE's relationship to inspire humanity because he felt few films explore how utopian societies come to exist. The process of depicting the descendants of humanity as the way they appear in the movie was slow. Stanton first decided to put a nose and ears on the Gels so the audience could recognize them. Eventually, fingers, legs, clothes, and other characteristics were added until they arrived at the concept of being fetus-like to allow the audience to see themselves in the characters.