Wall-E: One giant beep for mankind

It's a cartoon about a lonely robot who can't even speak, but America's leading critics are queuing up to hail Pixar's summer blockbuster as 'ET' meets 'Citizen Kane'. Tim Walker discovers why we're all about to fall for 'Wall-E' – and why it could even become the defining film of our times Wednesday, 9 July 2008 The lunch at which he was created is the stuff of legend. In 1994, as production wrapped on their first full-length feature film, Toy Story, four of Pixar Animation's big guns gathered at a restaurant in California to talk through ideas for projects. At that single meeting, the writer-director Andrew Stanton and his colleagues sketched out on napkins the ideas for A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo – and one more movie, about a lonely robot left behind when humans abandon Earth. His name was Wall-E. On... [read full story]