WALL-E

The idea dates to a 1994 lunch where Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Joe Ranft brainstormed what Pixar would make after Toy Story. Stanton's question was: what if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot? He made the robot a waste collector because a low-status, menial job made it instantly sympathetic. He and Docter spent two months on it as "Trash Planet" in 1995 and shelved it. Stanton picked it up again in 2002 while finishing Finding Nemo, and a story reel of the first twenty minutes in late 2003 convinced Lasseter and Steve Jobs to greenlight it. One early draft had the remnants of humanity as gelatinous green aliens; they became "big babies" instead.

The robot was built from odd parts. His eyes came from a pair of binoculars Stanton was handed at an A's game, which cost him an entire inning; Buster Keaton's stone face convinced Stanton he needed no nose or mouth; his arms slide on side tracks borrowed from an animator's father's inkjet printers. Stanton had iPod designer Jonathan Ive look over EVE, whose eyes were modeled on a Lite-Brite, and AUTO is a deliberate homage to HAL 9000. The crew watched a Keaton and a Chaplin film every day for almost a year to learn how to act without words. Ben Burtt, the Star Wars sound designer, recorded 2,500 sounds, twice what a Star Wars film needs, including a 1950 hand-cranked generator he bought on eBay for WALL-E's movement; the Macintosh startup chime plays when the battery is full.

It opened on June 27, 2008, to $63.1 million and finished at $532.5 million worldwide, ninth for the year. Critics placed it on 162 of the 286 year-end top-ten lists tallied by Movie City News, more than any other 2008 release, and Roger Ebert called it the best science-fiction movie in years. The second act's hoverchair-bound humans drew fire from both directions: the New York Post's Kyle Smith wondered whether a corporation had ever spent so much to insult its own customers, and National Review writers called it leftist propaganda, while a writer at The American Conservative argued it was a conservative film about the farm and the family. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with five more nominations; Disney's push for a Best Picture slot failed and set off a debate over whether the Academy had boxed animation into its own category.

Disney built 318-kilogram animatronic WALL-Es for the promotional tour but would not let them meet children for fear of a crushed foot, so photos were taken with a cardboard cutout. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 2021, the second Pixar feature after Toy Story. Pixar has said it considers the story finished.