Movies Coming Soon: Wall-E

At first glance the dark and gloomy premise of “Wall-E” hardly seems like your typical kid-friendly, Saturday afternoon movie experience. But then, neither did “Ratatouille,” the story of a rat that poked his way into the kitchen of a French restaurant. Pixar’s animation in “Wall-E” is characteristically inventive and our lonely robot is an engaging personality in his own right. The film’s Web site has some fun features, including “Build-a-Bot,” which allows you to build your very own virtual robot.

For a guy who only speaks in blips and bleeps, Wall-E is quite expressive. In “I Am Legend,” a movie with a similar “Last man on Earth” premise, Will Smith shared the screen and the planet with a German shepherd, but the only companion poor Wall-E gets is a pet cockroach. You can check out the film’s trailers on the Apple Web site to get a sense of the overall film; for a real treat, view “Vacuum Vignette,” a clever piece of animated physical comedy that even Buster Keaton would have been impressed by.

Pixar has produced a string of hits including “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “The Incredibles,” and, in doing so, has changed the animation landscape. If you ever wondered how these movies are made, Pixar’s Web site will walk you through the process using terms even an adult would understand.

Director and writer Andrew Stanton, a core member of the Pixar team, won an Oscar for “Finding Nemo.” Now he’s taking animation to a place where it’s never been before: Earth as a dead, garbage-strewn planet? Barbra Streisand? In a truly fascinating audio Q&A session, Stanton reveals the creative process that developed “Wall-E.” The interview is a little on the long side, but it’s worth listening to the whole thing.

Fred Willard appears in the film as the bungling head of the robot-building corporation that created Wall-E. Willard is not just a voice; he actually appears in the film. This will be the first time that Pixar has mixed live action and animation, although it has been done before in more traditionally animated films such as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Willard, a very funny character actor, has appeared in a multitude of films including “Waiting for Guffman,” and infamously as the clueless television commentator in “Best in Show.”

Most of us encounter robots exist solely in the domain of fiction. Well, maybe robots as sophisticated as Wall-E aren’t walking around the surface of the planet … yet. But these video clips of TechEBlog’s Top 10 Coolest Robots demonstrated what progress we’ve made so far. Start at clip #10 and work your way down to #1 (Along the way, you’ll discover that video clips for #9 and #2 are no longer available). This is fascinating—and shiver-inducing—stuff.