Metacritic Film

WALL-E

Starring Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger, and Kathy Najimy

MPAA RATING: G

Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios
Animation  |  Comedy  |  Family/Kids  |  Romance  |  Sci-fi
103 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters June 27, 2008

What if mankind had to leave Earth, and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off? After hundreds of lonely years of doing what he was built for, Wall-E discovers a new purpose in life when he meets a sleek search robot named EVE. EVE comes to realize that Wall-E has inadvertently stumbled upon the key to the planet’s future, and races back to space to report her findings to the humans. Meanwhile, WALL-E chases eve across the galaxy and sets into motion one of the most exciting and imaginative comedy adventures ever brought to the big screen. Joining WALL-E on his fantastic journey across a universe of never-before-imagined visions of the future is a hilarious cast of characters including a pet cockroach, and a heroic team of malfunctioning misfit robots. (Walt Disney Pictures)

WRITTEN BY
Jim Capobianco (titles)
Andrew Stanton

DIRECTED BY
Andrew Stanton

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

93 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Village Voice Robert Wilonsky
A film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate.
100 The Hollywood Reporter
The visual design of Wall-E is arguably Pixar's best. Stanton, who wrote the script with Jim Reardon from a story he concocted with Peter Docter, creates two fantastically imaginative, breathtakingly lit worlds.
100 Chicago Tribune
While I may argue with the little guy's taste in musicals, it's remarkable to see any film, in any genre, blend honest sentiment with genuine wit and a visual landscape unlike any other.
100 New York Post
A charming, hilarious robot love story aimed at the entire family.
100 USA Today
At once futuristic, funny and fantastical.
100 Washington Post John Anderson
The idea that a company in the business of mainstream entertainment would make something as creative, substantial and cautionary as WALL-E has to raise your hopes for humanity.
100 The Onion (A.V. Club)
It's Pixar's most daring experiment to date, but it still fits neatly into the studio's pantheon: Made with as much focus on heart as on visual quality, it's a sheer joy.
100 Entertainment Weekly
It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.
100 Wall Street Journal
The first half hour of WALL-E is essentially wordless, and left me speechless. This magnificent animated feature from Pixar starts on such a high plane of aspiration, and achievement, that you wonder whether the wonder can be sustained. But yes, it can.
100 TV Guide
It can hardly be called a children's film, but a masterpiece of feature-film animation for all ages.
100 Miami Herald
This is a beautiful movie.
100 Baltimore Sun
The movie does work, spectacularly.
100 Boston Globe
The best American film of the year to date.
100 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.
100 Los Angeles Times
Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, Wall-E gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films.
100 Time
It works; this is Pixar's most enthralling entertainment since "Nemo."
100 Newsweek
Once again, the Pixar wizards have pushed the animation envelope in unexpected directions and come up with a winner. Wondrously inventive, funny and poignant, WALL*E is part sci-fi adventure, part cautionary fable, part satire and part love story, which may be the best and most improbable part of all.
100 Rolling Stone
You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.
100 New York Magazine
The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.
100 Empire
To call WALL•E Pixar's best film would potentially denigrate films that deserve no scorn. But this is their most ambitious undertaking since "Toy Story" and storytelling of such charm and visual wit that it can stand proudly alongside the studio’s best. Absolute heaven.
91 Christian Science Monitor
The story line for WALL-E is probably too convoluted for small kids, and sometimes it suffers from techie overload, but it's more heartfelt than anything on the screens these days featuring humans.
91 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A charmer of a film and a delightful piece of storytelling.
90 NPR
The first hour of Wall-E is a crazily inventive, deliriously engaging and almost wordless silent comedy of the sort that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton used to make.
90 The New Yorker
Apparently, the movie has caused annoyance in some quarters because it criticizes the American way of life. This it does, and with suavity and supreme good humor. WALL-E is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible.
90 Film Threat
A thoroughly enjoyable film, and ranks with Pixar's best.
90 The New York Times
The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E -- in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen -- is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.
89 Austin Chronicle
This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that run the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin and Lewis.
88 Charlotte Observer
A potent environmental message wrapped up in an irresistibly cute romance between robots.
88 Chicago Sun-Times
Succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story.
88 ReelViews
Put simply, WALL-E is about as charming as movies get.
83 Portland Oregonian
It's a justifiably G-rated film, but parents may have some 'splainin' to do.
80 New York Daily News
Rotates around a rusty little robotic hero who's built, as the movie is, with such emotion, brains and humor that whole universes exist in his whirring tones and binocular eyes.
80 Chicago Reader
The movie's first half is largely free of dialogue, playing like silent comedy, while the second act offers a breathtaking tour of the cosmos.
80 Variety
Walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing.
80 Slate Dana Stevens
Wall-E is an improbable delight, a G-rated crowd-pleaser.
75 Philadelphia Inquirer
With rich, detailed, cinematic animation and terrific sound effects, WALLE pulls this unlikely love story off.
75 Premiere Jenni Miller
When it works, it really works, but it's debatable whether its target audience will really enjoy anything more than the nifty robots. Which is fine, too. Robots are pretty cool.
75 San Francisco Chronicle
In the moment, it's intermittently transcendent, heartrending and beautiful ... and busy, repetitious and boring.
70 Salon.com
The picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product.

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