WALL•E, right, only has eyes for Eve, an egg-shaped probe whose mission is to find life on Earth in the 28th century.

pixar

A dead planet and a love-starved robot are the unusual ingredients that make WALL•E spin. And spin it does, with romance, sentiment, adventure and some very funny moments.

WALL•E, the latest from the Pixar branch of Disney, is set in the 28th century. Humans have abandoned their trash-strewn, smoggy, ecological disaster of a planet for deluxe resort spaceships that circle the dead Earth until the day (which no one thinks is coming soon) when the place can once again support life. The only being still on Earth is WALL•E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class and pronounced “Wally”) who got left behind and was long ago forgotten. Nevertheless, thanks to energy that’s still captured on his solar panels, his relentless mission continues day after day. WALL•E’s only purpose is to gather the trash built up over hundreds of years, compact it into a box-size hunk of junk, then stack the boxes one atop the other. Over the centuries the small-refrigerator-sized robot, which has goggle-like stereopticon eyes and moves on bulldozer-like tracks, has stacked enough cubes of junk to create several dozen skyscrapers.

But WALL•E (his sort of human sounds were created by Ben Burtt) has come to realize how alone and lonely he is following centuries of playing and replaying and replaying again musical numbers from the movie version of Hello, Dolly!, his only videotape. He’s enamored of the rousing song “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” in which two young swains who have abandoned their jobs in Yonkers for a day of adventure in Manhattan sing merrily about their plans. WALL•E sings along with the characters on screen, waving an old hub cap over his head the way the men in the movie wave their straw hats.

He’s also especially intrigued by the song “It Only Takes a Moment” as a young man begins falling in love, shyly taking a young woman’s hand. This, WALL•E sadly realizes, is something that has been missing from his mechanical life and it’s something he can never hope to find. His only friend on the barren planet is what must be the last remaining cockroach on Earth. Sigh.

But then — ZOWIE! — a spaceship lands on Earth. It deposits a sleek, egg-shaped probe whose mission is to find signs of life and, if so, bring it back to the enormous orbiting ship, Axiom, thus proving that it’s safe for humankind to return.

She is EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) and — you guessed it! — of course WALL•E, being a 28th-century Adam, is immediately smitten with her.

At first EVE (Elissa Knight) pays no attention to WALL•E as he shadows her on her duties. But when she becomes aware of his persistence, she sees him as a threat and tries to obliterate him with her ray gun. Eventually, however, during a storm, EVE and WALL•E get thrown together in his hovel of a home. There, he opens her to a wider world — the magic of a light bulb, a Rubik’s Cube, his beloved Hello, Dolly! and, as a gesture of affection, a tiny potted plant.

A plant! A living green thing! She’s excited, thrilled. EVE puts the plant in her body. Then — nothing! EVE shuts down.

In a beautifully tender, romantic sequence, the heartsick WALL•E, who doesn’t understand what has happened, begins taking the inert EVE around on his rounds. At one point, he even decorates her in Christmas lights.

But EVE’s mission eventually becomes clear when a spaceship returns to Earth to collect her and return her to Axiom. WALL•E, frantic, desperate and lovesick at the thought of losing EVE, hitches a ride on the outside of the rocketing ship. And that’s where this mild-mannered film picks up and the adventures really begin.

Once on board, the thought of coming face to face with a living plant from Earth creates a frenzy of excitement for the ship’s captain (Jeff Garlin) and its computer (Sigourney Weaver). But where is it? The plant is no longer protectively inside EVE. Was it ever there? Or has she simply malfunctioned?

What follows is a race against time as EVE and WALL•E must find the plant, elude the robot police, escape from a loony bin for defective robots, get shot into space and bring the humans on board Axiom closer together.

After seven centuries, humankind has grown fat, flabby and coddled. They float around on recliners where their every whim — whether it’s a plate of food or a milkshake — is catered to instantly. They are peppered by an unending blather of messages to buy more and more and more, delivered by the Buy n Large Corporation which runs the luxury space station. (Who pays for all this? Who grows and processes the food?) If they fall off their recliners, they can’t pick themselves up. WALL•E may be the first animated film to explore not only an environmental nightmare, but the problems of a pampered, overweight, out-of-shape, disinterested citizenry … although in a humorous way.

There are thrills, too, especially when Auto, Axiom’s auto-pilot, tries to scuttle the Captain’s plans to return to Earth because it will spell the end of Auto’s autocratic authority. And there are funny moments with the endearingly single-minded M-O (Microbe-Obliterator), a small robot whose only mission is to immediately sweep up whatever mess it finds. With WALL•E’s 700 years of grime, there’s a lot to clean up.

Although WALL•E occasionally dawdles and also seems redundant in its chase scenes, its charm is undeniable. Oddly, it’s WALL•E who shows humans what life is all about.

WALL•E is preceded on screen by Pixar director Doug Sweetland’s hilarious short cartoon Presto, in which a hungry magician’s rabbit turns his owner’s act inside out and upside down and into the rafters above the stage when he doesn’t get his carrot. Rather than magician Alec Azam pulling the rabbit out of his top hat, the rabbit turns the tables and the magician finds himself inside his hat. And that’s just one of his growing list of problems. Presto is short — only five minutes long — but quick as a bunny and worth the price of admission alone.

****WALL•E

Voices: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver.

Rated: G.

mjanuson@projo.com