Get ready to fall in love with a glorified trash compactor - and ditto for his little buddy, a cute cockroach.
“WALL•E,” the new Pixar 3-D extravaganza co-written and directed by Boston’s own Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo’), is a something of a miracle in the middle of a summer-movie season marked by sequels, reboots and comic-book superheros.
A tribute to the art of filmmaking featuring a mechanized Little Tramp-like hero of Chaplin-esque proportions, “WALL•E” starts out like a hybrid of “I, Robot” and “I Am Legend” (“I Am Robot Legend”?). It’s setting is a Philip K. Dickian, post-apocalytic, 29th century Earth poisoned by years of neglect and abuse. What’s left of humanity has left the planet.
What’s left on Earth is WALL•E (also known as Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class), a little, solar-powered, cube-shaped thingamabob with moving twin tracks, rolling binocular eyes and gangly metal appendages (think Mars Rover meets R2-D2).
All seven dwarfs in one, WALL•E goes about his Sisyphean job of compacting row after row of trash, and categorizing a shed full of parts. He feeds his insect buddy a diet of indestructible Twinkie-like treats and spends his spare time watching and humming along to an old VHS of “Hello, Dolly.”
One day, a giant spacecraft lands and deposits a shapely, white, ovoid ’bot that zips around like Ironman and looks like the next generation of Apple’s iPhone. Hello, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). Before you can say, “Madam, I’m Adam,” WALL•E is smitten, and we have the first fully mechanical romantic comedy since “Heartbeeps” (1981), a film featuring work by the late great special-effects wizard Stan Winston.
WALL•E is voiced by Ben Burtt, creator of the sounds and voices of the aliens and droids of “Star Wars,” and “speaks” in a glossary of squeaks, pops, chirps, burps, whistles, whizzes, whirs and an unmistakable meep-meep. Unlike, say, C-3PO, WALL•E is a droid of few actual words. EVE, meanwhile, has a bit of “The Day the Earth Stood Still’s” Gort in her.
Together, they enjoy la vie en rose until they find themselves aboard an enormous, mechanized space-cruiser where surviving humans have evolved into semiboneless consumer-blobs too lazy to stand up and up against evil ’bots led by a HAL??? clone and a ship’s-computer voiced by a maleficent Sigourney Weaver, who don’t want the humans to return to Earth.
Stanton pays worthy tribute to “Star Wars” and Stanley Kubrick’s incomparable milestone “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A sequence in which WALL•E and EVE waltz in the void is a beautiful, comic evocation of “2001” ’s ballet mechanique.
But “WALL•E” stands proudly and uniquely on his own two tracks. “Presto,” a short animated film preceding “WALL•E” is a total delight. Some days I just feel like a rogue robot.
(“WALL•E” contains explosive scenes that might frighten very young children.)
Rated G. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium and suburban theaters.
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