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12. Wall-E

This is my favorite Pixar film. Wall-E is a spectacular feat in animation. Compelling narrative, a beautiful opening half (and not quite as good but still excellent second half), strong positive messages, Wall-E exemplifies a lot of the best that Pixar has to offer. The story of a little robot who falls in love and ends up on a journey through space to save the human race. Simple enough. The first half of the film is probably the best 40 minutes of animation I've ever seen. New animating technologies were applied for lighting in this film (consulted with legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins) that helped really make this film feel so organic and so gorgeous.

I remember falling in love with Wall-E as a kid, he (it technically, but for convenience sake I'm calling Wall-E a he) was drawn all over my notebooks in the animation camp I used to go to over summers back in the day (I was a nerd, it was a camp dedicated to animation and comic book illustration and I loved the sh*t out of it, it was held by a guy who used to illustrate Wonder Woman comics back in the day) and in my school notebooks for the next year. Pixar has a way of manufacturing cuteness that is just unbelievable. Not just in Wall-E (though him above all), but in all the robots they all have unique quirks and bugs and sounds that really portray such adorable personas in non-human non-verbal characters which is d*mn impressive.

The film is also really powerful in its environmentalist messages. It paints a pretty scary picture of the future, a world that we destroyed through our rampant consumerism, and the only reason we survived is because artificial intelligence came along and kind of pampered us into subservience on a ship designed to feed into that same consumerist culture, to the point that humanity has become a bunch of 700 pound useless blobs recreating to death. It's important to realize that this isn't just science fiction though, these environmental changes are what's coming years and years down the road if we don't change the way we treat the planet, and the film does a great job of addressing that.

Beautiful, powerful, adorable film, Wall-E is a classic and in my opinion the best movie Pixar has ever made.