It stars the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver, with Fred Willard in a live-action role.

The film incorporates various topics including consumerism, corporatocracy, nostalgia, waste management, human environmental impact and concerns, obesity/sedentary lifestyles, and global catastrophic risk.

The film received critical acclaim for its animation, story, voice acting, characters, visuals, score, sound design, screenplay, use of minimal dialogue, and scenes of romance.

WALL-E's routine of compressing trash and collecting interesting objects is broken by the arrival of a robot called EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), which scans the planet for sustainable life.

"[20] Having struggled for many years with making the characters in Toy Story appealing, Stanton found his simple Robinson Crusoe-esque idea of a lonely robot on a deserted planet strong.

When WALL-E comes to the Axiom, he incites a Spartacus-style rebellion by the robots against the remnants of the human race, which were cruel alien Gels (completely devolved, gelatinous, boneless, legless, see-through, green creatures that resemble Jell-O).

James Hicks, a physiologist, mentioned to Stanton the concept of atrophy and the effects prolonged weightlessness would have on humans living in space for an inordinately extended time period.

As an homage to Get Smart,[41] AUTO takes the plant and goes into the bowels of the ship into a room resembling a brain where he watches videos of Buy n Large's scheme to clean up the Earth falling apart through the years.

Jim Capobianco, director of the Ratatouille short film Your Friend the Rat, created an end credits animation that continued the story—and stylized in different artistic movements throughout history—to clarify an optimistic tone.

Eggleston divided the inside of the ship into three sections; the rear's economy class has a basic gray concrete texture with graphics keeping to the red, blue, and white of the BnL logo.

The premier class is a large Zen-like spa with colors limited to turquoise, cream, and tan, and leads on to the captain's warm carpeted and wooded quarters and the sleek dark bridge.

He found the latter idea "powerful" because it allowed the audience to project personalities onto the characters, as they do with babies and pets: "You're compelled … you almost can't stop yourself from finishing the sentence 'Oh, I think it likes me!

[41] Burtt had completed Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and told his wife he would no longer work on films with robots, but found WALL-E and its substitution of voices with sound "fresh and exciting".

Nostalgia is also expressed through the musical score, as the film opens with a camera shot of outer space that slowly zooms into a waste filled Earth while playing "Put on Your Sunday Clothes", reflecting on simpler and happier times in human history.

Dreher emphasized the false god parallels to BnL in a scene where a robot teaches infants "B is for Buy n Large, your very best friend", which he compared to modern corporations such as McDonald's creating brand loyalty in children.

Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) built animatronic WALL-Es to promote the picture, which made appearances at Disneyland Resort,[81] the Franklin Institute, the Miami Science Museum, the Seattle Center, and the Tokyo International Film Festival.

"[86] Small quantities of merchandise were sold for WALL-E, as Cars items were still popular, and many manufacturers were more interested in Speed Racer, which was a successful product line despite the film's failure at the box office.

[106] WALL-E grossed over $10 million in Japan ($44,005,222), UK, Ireland and Malta ($41,215,600), France and the Maghreb region ($27,984,103), Germany ($24,130,400), Mexico ($17,679,805), Spain ($14,973,097), Australia ($14,165,390), Italy ($12,210,993), and Russia and the CIS ($11,694,482).

Writer/director Andrew Stanton and his team have created a classic screen character from a metal trash compactor who rides to the rescue of a planet buried in the debris that embodies the broken promise of American life.

The website's consensus reads: "Wall-E's stellar visuals testify once again to Pixar's ingenuity, while its charming star will captivate younger viewers—and its timely story offers thought-provoking subtext.

[113] Other critics who named WALL-E their favorite film of 2008 included Tom Charity of CNN,[114] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, A. O. Scott of The New York Times, Christopher Orr of The New Republic, Ty Burr and Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal, and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.

He said it pushed the boundaries of animation by balancing esoteric ideas with more immediately accessible ones, and that the main difference between the film and other science fiction projects rooted in an apocalypse was its optimism.

"[117] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times named WALL-E "an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment, and a decent science-fiction story" and said the scarcity of dialogue would allow it to "cross language barriers" in a manner appropriate to the global theme, and noted it would appeal to adults and children.

He praised the animation, describing the color palette as "bright and cheerful … and a little bit realistic", and that Pixar managed to generate a "curious" regard for the WALL-E, comparing his "rusty and hard-working and plucky" design favorably to more obvious attempts at creating "lovable" lead characters.

[116] Kyle Smith of the New York Post, wrote that by depicting future humans as "a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk", WALL-E was darker and more cynical than any major Disney feature film he could recall.

"[120] Maura Judkis of U.S. News & World Report questioned whether this depiction of "frighteningly obese humans" would resonate with children and make them prefer to "play outside rather than in front of the computer, to avoid a similar fate".

[121] A few notable critics have argued that the film is vastly overrated,[122] claiming it failed to "live up to such blinding, high-wattage enthusiasm",[123] and that there were "chasms of boredom watching it", in particular "the second and third acts spiraled into the expected".

He is shown facing a typological dilemma of classifying a spork as either a fork or spoon, and his nostalgic interest in the human past further demonstrated by his attachment to repeated viewings of the 1969 film Hello, Dolly!.

Scholars such as Ian Tattersall and Steve Jones have similarly discussed scenarios where elements of modern technology (such as medicine) may have caused human evolution to slow or stop.

McMaster's four-foot robot made an appearance at the Walt Disney Family Museum and was featured during the opening week of Tested.com[160] a project headed up by Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of MythBusters.