My favorite Pixar film features two robots who say little more than each others’ names, but somehow, as if by magic, WALL-E manages to convey more emotion than films that try twice as hard to do so. There’s a charming purity in the characters of WALL-E and EVE, who to differing degrees struggle against their ‘directives’ to form a bond. The fact that these two odd ‘bots end up protecting the last sliver of life on Earth — a tiny plant — could have been cloying, but Pixar knows how to handle the material. When WALL-E finds the fragile vine, he simply collects it in an old shoe and places it on a shelf with other artifacts of a bygone era. 
“What if a gun had a soul?” That’s how director Brad Bird pitched The Iron Giant to Warner Bros. Animation. The gun in question is The Iron Giant himself, a robot of unknown origin that crash lands on Earth in 1957, at the height of the atomic scare. He dents his head and can’t remember where he’s from or why he exists. He befriends a boy named Hogarth, a savvy little kid raised by a single mother, whose seen enough science-fiction movies to know how the public will react to his extra-terrestrial friend. With the help of a local beatnik artist, Hogarth keeps the giant hidden from a snooping government official, all while forging a poignant relationship with the impressionable robot.
