Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 9 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

We took my daughter to see Disney Pixar’s latest animated feature, WALL-E, tonight, and it was great. For a film with only a few characters and almost no dialog, it tells a story anyone can follow and understand. It’s not as cartoonish or cutesy as Pixar’s previous fare but will still reach out to all ages (there were several over-55 couples in the theater we went to).

For a box with tank treads and a pair of binoculars stuck on top, WALL-E himself is amazingly expressive. EVE was obviously designed by someone (Jobs?) at Apple with her smooth, white, iPhone-ish appearance (in other nods to Apple, WALL-E’s boot-up sound is the same one used on the Mac, an iPod video makes a cameo, and according to IMDB the voice of AUTO was done by MacInTalk, Apple’s text-to-speech program). My personal favorite was MO, the little cleaning robot who is just trying to keep the Axiom clean despite WALL-E tracking dirt everywhere.

There are plenty of sci-fi references in the film for the older crowd. AUTO, the Axiom star cruiser’s auto-pilot has a HAL-like red eye; Sigourney Weaver is the Axiom’s computer voice; “Also sprach Zarathustra” (also known as the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey“) is used at one point. I’m sure there were others I missed but there was a lot to take in with just a single viewing.

Oh, and the magic hat/rabbit short at the beginning was hilarious too.

Two thumbs way up … I highly recommend it.