Featuring the voices of Ben Burtt, Jeff Garlin, and Sigourney Weaver. Rated G.

The combination of passion for its message—that we need to get off our fat asses and do something to save this ravaged world—breathtaking animation, and love for its simple characters makes a healthy tonic in WALL-E, the best thing yet from the Disney-Pixar combo (and that’s saying something). Writer-director Andrew Stanton, who did the same for Finding Nemo and A Bug’s Life, here centres on characters who aren’t even alive, technically.

The lack of humans, it takes us some time to learn, is because the tale is set seven centuries into the future, in an abandoned New Yorkish environment featuring mostly rust and sandstorms. Thanks to some remarkable self-repairing qualities, one waste-disposal unit called WALL-E (voiced monosyllabically by veteran sound designer Ben Burtt) is still tidying up the place. In fact, he (alongside a pet cockroach, because those things are indestructible) has created a nifty nest full of lighters, dolls’ heads, and other interesting effluvia from the era before the giant Buy n Large corporation took over the planet.

Life in a barren wasteland suddenly improves with the arrival of a space probe bearing a radically more modern robot sheathed in smooth white plastic and discernibly female (because these things still matter, apparently). The courtship of Eve, as the visitor is called (she is voiced by Elissa Knight), makes up the meat of the story, although to tell you much more—other than that Jeff Garlin is an appropriately porky space captain and Sigourney Weaver provides a HAL 9000–like ship’s voice—would be to spoil the tale’s satirically green-thumbed fun.

The gorgeously designed movie features a charmingly eclectic end-credit sequence, and it starts with “Presto”, a retro-feel Pixar cartoon that alone is worth the price of admission. The package should carry a warning, though: don’t get extra butter on that popcorn!