Best movie of the year..

Last night, I saw Wall E and for what it's worth, I can only agree with all the positive reviews. It's been by far the best movie this year.

In the words of Roger Ebert :

an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story. (...) That it works largely without spoken dialogue is all the more astonishing; it can easily cross language barriers, which is all the better, considering that it tells a planetary story.
Or of the NYTimes:

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.

In addition to its beautiful look, drawing, and use of colors, Wall E is extremely well written with a distinct message which can only resonate in today's world on more than one level (topics such as the environment, mass consumerism, big business à-la-Wall Mart, politics, health, leisure, dependency, addiction, etc...)

Even more remarkable I find, is the growing affection I felt for the main character, a very simple robot with reduced but well rendered human expressions. It beats R2D2 or even ET! It somewhat reminded me of another robot from an 80's movie called "Short Circuit". The influence seems pretty clear but plays in favor of Wall E iwhich s far better and more touching. Apparently, I'm not the only one who made that comparison....

According to Wall-E designer, Andrew Stanton:

"you don't need a mouth, you don't need a nose, you get a whole personality just from [the eyes]", which meant the audience would feel he is "not just a human in a robot shell".

He said he found the inspiration by "playing with a pair of binoculars, which looked happy or sad depending on whether they were upside down or not". Ingenuity in simple things!

NOTE: and of course, sci fi fans will not have miss the references to "2001 Space Odyssey" of course (with for instance AUTO, the autopilot computer with a red "eye")