An unexpected love story combined with a gentle reminder to care... care about each other and about the planet ... combine in anotherdelightfully family-friendly computer-animated feature from PixarStudios and Walt Disney Pictures. Alan Silverman has this look at thestory of a robot named Wall-E.

The sparkling optimism of the1969 movie musical Hello Dolly! makes a stark contrast to the Earthof 700 years in the future on which it echoes. People are long gone.All that's left are overgrown, decaying buildings and garbage. Lots andlots and lots of garbage, which is what the one remaining functioningrobot is programmed to collect, compress and pile up in stacks thatreach the sky.

Wall-E

WALL-E, an acronym for "Waste Allocation LoadLifter, Earth Class," is a yellow dumpster on Caterpillar treads withexpressive video eyes on a stalk rising from his boxy body. Aftercenturies of stacking the remains of civilization, he ... or it ... hasalso developed a curiosity and selects unique items for a specialcollection: a Rubik's cube, an egg-beater, a digital music player... and, perhaps his most prized possession, a videotape of HelloDolly!

Watching the couple on screen touches something deep inWall-E's cyber-heart as he tries to match their hand-holding with hisutilitarian claws that were designed for trash collecting, nottenderness.

Then one remarkable day, with a thunderous roar, arocket drops down from the sky and out pops a sleek, shiny flying robotnamed "Eve" - for "Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator" - programmedto find out if life has returned to the wasted Earth. It is love atfirst sight for "Wall-E" who now must do whatever he can to keep frombeing alone anymore.

Andrew Stanton

"My specific premise was 'irrational lovedefeats life's programming,' " says Andrew Stanton, who created thePixar hit Finding Nemo. He is co-writer and director of Wall-E.

"Ihad two programmed characters fighting to figure out what life and thepoint of it is ... which is love ... and discovering what that meant,"Stanton explains. "It took irrational acts of love to do that. We allhave our habits, our routines, and our programmed things that we fallinto to distract ourselves from really living. They are not necessarilybad or evil in and of themselves. It's just that we can use that ascrutch to fill up our day and avoid the act of having relationships andcontacting one another. We see it every day. We can all be in the sameroom and all be in our own little world; and it's easier and easier todo it."

There are more words in that comment than Stanton put inthe entire first half of "Wall-E," but he maintains the film is full ofdialog.

"To me it has dialog from frame one. It's just not theway you and I speak, but every little buzz and whirr and hum wasplanned and executed exactly to be a way so that it would convey acertain intention whenever Wall-E or Eve 'spoke,' " he says. "When Iwrote the script for the movie, before we drew or executed anything, Ihad all the dialog written for each of the characters and I wouldbracket it so I knew exactly what their intentions were; so in my mind,it's full of dialog."

"A lot of the expressions for Wall-E andEve are part of their sound effects," says Ben Burtt, who creates the"voice" of Wall-E; the Oscar-winning sound designer has previouslygiven personality to, among other mechanical objects, "Star Wars" robotR2-D2.

Scene from Wall-E

"The trick in creating these illusions that machines aretalking is always somehow finding the balance between the human aspectof it - that there's a person or some kind of character with a soulbehind it - with the machine aspect," he says, "because you want toconvince the audience that these are talking machines. There's a humaninput to it. You can start out by recording a word ... 'Wall-E' or'ohhhh' ... and get as much performance into it as you can; but thenthat sound is taken into the computer and dissected.

"You canchange the pitch, freeze or stretch vowels or consonants within a wordand actually add another level of performance to it. So it's a balancebetween human performance and electronic processing," he explains.

Something"Wall-E" discovers becomes the key to humans returning home to restorethe devastated planet; however, writer-director Stanton insists he wasnot making an animated "Inconvenient Truth."

"I did not have anecological message. I knew I was dealing with elements that basicallymatch it, but that was never what I was pushing. The last thing I wantis to be preached to when I watch a movie," he says. "I didn't mindthat I was touching similar elements because it is not necessarily abad thing to be associated with; but it was all basically to say'everything else is going to benefit if you pay attention torelationships.' "

Elissa Knight is the voice of Eve; and the"Wall-E" voice cast also features Jeff Garlin, Kathy Najimy, SigourneyWeaver and Pixar stalwart John Ratzenberger. In a 'first' for a Pixarfilm, comic actor Fred Willard actually appears in the film as a humancharacter, albeit on ancient videos. The musical score is by ThomasNewman.