Pixar Studios' mascot is a bouncy, swing-arm Luxo lamp that hops across the screen with the happy-go-lucky energy you'd expect from Bugs Bunny, not a minimalist piece of spring-balanced steel. If Pixar can imbue a simple desk light with that much personality, what do you think the animation house could do with a few dozen fully functioning robots?

If you guessed "miracles," move to the head of the class. "WALL•E," Pixar's latest triumph, is a sweet-spirited comedy, a touching love story and a stirring adventure, even though humans are seldom seen and hardly a word is spoken for the first hour. Instead, we're irresistibly drawn to invest our emotions in a rusty, ugly little trash compactor with a heart of gold.

WALL•E is a waste-removal robot with googly binocular eyes, a squat cubist body and tank-tread legs. When we meet him, some 800 years in the future, he's the last vestige of intelligent life on Earth. The depopulated planet is a dead zone of rubbish that our hero works every day to clean. He's developed curiosity about humans from daily viewings of "Hello, Dolly" and collects mementos of the departed race. He can't figure out the function of a brassiere (eyeshades?) and prefers a jewelry case to the diamond ring inside.

But he senses that something special occurs when singers hold hands in his favorite musical, wistfully tilting his head and no doubt dreaming of another being to clasp his metal pincers with. Somewhere in his circuits is a spark of humanity. And with the arrival of sleek, pretty EVE, a vegetation-detecting droid, a delightful romance begins to blossom. WALL•E follows his newfound love across the galaxy and in the process saves the human race from its own worst inclinations.

The robots are wonderfully realized creations, capable of subtle pantomime yet never operating outside their design parameters. They don't bend or squash unrealistically, though they pulse with something a lot like organic life. EVE is an especially fetching droid with a vaguely familiar design. She has a graceful milk-white plastic body, stylish ventilation slits and sleek, touchscreen-style controls -- Apple-influenced in jokes that should bring a smile to Pixar honcho Steve Jobs' lips.

The photorealistic visuals render the machines and their surroundings with astounding precision. Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins ("No Country for Old Men") consulted on the film's visual style, which has a palpable feel of reality. Looking at the dust-swept desert Earth you feel you could draw a finger across the movie screen and smudge it. And the film crosses another technical hurdle seamlessly, inserting live-action scenes into a background of computer animation.

Fred Willard ("Best in Show") has several deliciously daffy appearances as the onetime boss of the Buy-N-Large Corp., a colossal conglomerate that turned the planet into a junkyard. Without sledgehammering the point, the film offers a tart critique of our overreliance on technology to amuse, connect and provide for us. After nearly a millennium of lazy self-indulgence, humans have devolved into dim, walrus-like layabouts whose savior is a little mechanized garbage collector.

The film bristles with hidden jokes for science fiction fans, references to "2001," "Short Circuit" and "Star Wars" that enrich the experience without hijacking the story. Ben Burtt, the sound-effects genius responsible for the audio design of George Lucas' masterpiece provides WALL•E's evocative squeaks, sighs and mechanical vocalizations. Sigourney Weaver voices a computer very like the one that threatened her with destruction in "Alien." And WALL•E himself is R2-D2 with more heart and soul.

Continuing a string of successes that pit Pixar films against only other Pixar films in terms of quality animation, "WALL•E" makes the count nine masterpieces in a row.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186