[Nick]

I'm gonna have to say that I think Parm has missed the point of WALL-E completely, sorry, but there it is.

This isn't an eco-film warning of doom and gloom a la The Day After Tomorrow, nor is it a love story like Brief Encounter... this a family film in the very best tradition of what Pixar do best, which is pitch a film on a variety of levels, knowing that adults would just as much like to be entertained as the kids who drag them to see films of this ilk.

And in that respect WALL-E does the job brilliantly. There's loads of slapstick humour for the kids to laugh at and for us older viewers to enjoy plus there's the not-so-subtle message of consumerism being a bad thing for older tweens to get a grip with.

WALL-E is actually a fairly damning commentary on the United States with it's rapidly increasing obesity population and it's thoroughly insular, ill-educated people. Even the name of the ark-ship, Axiom, has a meaning - a truth that doesn't require proof - showing no little irony in that it's full of lazy, obese, helpless humans with no wish to look beyond the borders of their own private world... ringing any bells here?

So the parallels are obvious but then, with a noted lack of any sense of irony, perhaps sledgehammering subtleties home is what's needed to make an entire nation question it's way of life... (The Kyoto Agreement is a good example of when American citizens could've made a difference but either didn't know or didn't care)

So whilst WALL-E neatly sidesteps the probably too tender issue of natural resources, it does slam into emissions, pollutants and consumer driven waste head on... Don't be fooled by the overt anti-multinational mega corporation message, WALL-E isn't about not buying Coca Cola or Nike, it's about being aware of your impact upon the planet... but that's still not the main thrust of the film.

No, the mian thrust of the film is about a robot, who, after 700 years of doing the job he was made for, has developed a personality and an inquisitiveness of a small child... and he's lonely. As such, you really feel for him and it's pleasing to see his innocence survives the film untarnished.. and WALL-E will be familiar to any parent who has watched their child discover something wondrous for the first time in objects we usually find mundane and take for granted.

There's plenty of other film references in here for the film fan, the most touching for me being the last 10 minutes where all I could think of was the end of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but even then, Pixar have managed to avoid the overly sweet, syrupy sentiment of a Spielberg film, so you won't have to suffer an ET ending here.

Visually, WALL-E is easily the best CGI movies yet produced, with such a range of filmic effects that you will, especially in the Earth based scenes, forget you're watching CGI. There's depth of field, focal planes, crash zooming and loads of other effects that suggest that the whole idea is to have shot the movie as if there really was a camera on the ground with a robot in front of it... and the dust and flame effects are amazing.

On the Pixar scale, WALL-E, for me, just nudges ahead of Toy Story and Monsters Inc, for the sheer spectacle of the film itself. Toy Story never stopped feeling like a cartoon, Monsters Inc whilst imaginative and thoroughly enjoyable was a just a bit too treacly at the end whereas WALL-E hits it just right...

Oh, and as for product placement... one Mac sound and an iPod does not mean product placement... those are global icons that are easily recognisable and are there to show you that you're part of the same society being portrayed in the film.

But beside that, it's just a damn fun film to watch and enjoy... even if the space ship bit does feel a bit rushed and certainly had more scope for more action and fun.

All in all, this is certainly a 5 star movie and well worth a watch, more so than my last cinema visit, Indian Jones and the Boring As Hell Final Gasp.