Film of the week: WALL.E

WALL.E (U)

Director: Elissa Knight
Running time: 103 minutes

****

A POST-APOCALYPTIC robot love story is a risky move even for a studio that has had hits with clockpunching monsters and cooking rats, but WALL.E is Pixar's most delightfully ambitious work to date – a film with the charm of Finding Nemo, the narrative grace of Ratatouille and the rust-bucket heart of R2D2.

There are death rays, desolation and destruction but also confidence, joy, steadfastness and affection. Pixar has made an emotionally resonant, inventively hilarious movie.

From the start, it nails up its maverick colours with a jaunty Michael Crawford on the soundtrack singing 'Put On Your Sunday Clothes', as we cruise through a panorama of stars and galaxies. Kubrick used Strauss to fill the vacuum of his space epic but for WALL.E Andrew Stanton uses a hokey paean to cloudless optimism. This film acknowledges that when we are at our most besotted, corniness is an apotheosis of love. It's also not the last time you'll think of Kubrick.

Finally, the camera descends on a barren, dusty Earth, where junk has finally overwhelmed the planet, the human population has bolted off to space and robots have been left to clear up. Over the centuries all the machines have broken down or given up – except for one WALL.E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), a boxy, binocular-eyed little robot programmed to compact junk into tidy cubes.

Somewhere along the way, WALL.E has developed a personality, a best friend (a cockroach) and a tendency to store away interesting trinkets. Most of all, he likes to watch an ancient videotape he's found of Hello Dolly, entranced by the idea of holding the hand of the one he loves, as Crawford does when singing 'It Only Takes A Moment'.

Apart from Crawford's voice, there are no human sounds for 45 minutes, but although WALL.E isn't much of a talker, he does make expressive clacks, whirrs, and burps via sound designer Ben Burtt, who gave R2D2 his emotive chirps, and WALL.E's images are as immediately readable as a futuristic Buster Keaton film.

Things get noisier when a space probe drops off EVE (voiced by Elissa Knight) who is sleek and white with glowing blue eyes like an Apple design. WALL.E boots up his solar batteries every morning to the Mac fanfare, suggesting these robots are literally made for each other, and that Pixar kinda misses former chairman, Apple's Steve Jobs. EVE stands for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, and she has a mission, a raygun and a tendency to incinerate anything that moves. Tricky, moody, and potentially explosive, she immediately steals WALL.E's heart.

Back at his bachelor pad he shows her a seedling he's repotted into a shoe. This is just what she's looking for – evidence that Earth is ready for recolonisation, and she follows her programming to head home to the mothership, with WALL.E a stowaway on her rocket.

The first half of WALL.E is like an Arthur C Clarke poem, but on the spaceship the story becomes less lyrical and more satirical. The ship is like a giant luxury cruiser, peopled with Beryl Cook-shaped humans who live in recliner armchairs and no longer know or care why they are still floating in space – although there's a clue in the ship's guidance system, which has an ominous red HAL 9000 eye. The worthlessness and unlikability of humankind seems a bleak point for a kids' film to make, but it's the robots who have the souls, provide the laughs, and generate the wholehearted message that irrational adoration can defeat life's programming.

• On general release from Friday