WALL-E

Short newspaper like review: Brilliant. Absolutely stunning. A must see.

Plot from trailer: Humans, having made a mess of the Earth, leave en mass and leave behind an army of WALL-E robots to clean up the planet. But 700 years later they still haven't returned and only one robot is still functioning.

And from that a brilliant story about heroics, romance, robots, spaceships and corrupt corporations emerges.

It has some unusual elements for a Pixar movie. For a start, there's a real person in it! Fred Willard as the CEO of BnL, seen in video messages. A little surreal, but he's definitely the right choice in the role. Second, and as some have mentioned, the humans are badly defined. All the same size/shape, with very little to give them any character. But this is deliberate for two reasons; the robots are the real stars of the show, and they're brilliantly realised but more importantly the humans have no character because of the . Sorry, but you'll understand when you see it.

And thirdly, the ship's autopilot is played by an actual computer. It's not an actor, but in fact MacinTalk, a text to speech program that comes with Macintosh computers Very unusual, but very well done. There's a lot of Apple references in this movie. For those who know their sci-fi, they might be able to make guesses about AUTO.

In fact, the only big name star that I recognised was Sigourney Weaver as the ship's computer. The guy playing WALL-E (and most of the other robots) is better known as a sound designer than an actor. Not that you'll have much chance to listen for the first thirty minutes of the film, as it is nearly devoid of dialogue up until that point.

As you'd expect, the film is crammed with loads of visual references, inside jokes and gags. It's a joy to watch.

The opening short animation; Presto is genius. As Alasdair said: never has CGI come closer to Tex Avery...

Score: A++ It's not quite as good as Toy Story, but then....what is?

OQ: I didn't know we had a pool!