Box office WALL-E grossed $223.8 million in the United States and Canada and $308.7 million overseas, for a worldwide total of $532.5 million, In the US and Canada,
WALL-E opened in 3,992 theaters on June 27, 2008. The film grossed $23.1 million on its opening day, the highest of all nine Pixar titles to date. During its opening weekend, it topped the box office with $63,087,526.
WALL-E crossed the $200 million mark by August 3, during its sixth weekend.
WALL-E grossed over $10 million in Japan ($44,005,222), UK, Ireland and
Malta ($41,215,600), France and the
Maghreb region ($27,984,103), Germany ($24,130,400),
Mexico ($17,679,805), Spain ($14,973,097), Australia ($14,165,390), Italy ($12,210,993), and Russia and the
CIS ($11,694,482).
Critical response The
American Film Institute named
WALL-E as one of the best films of 2008; the jury rationale states:
WALL-E proves to this generation and beyond that the film medium's only true boundaries are the human imagination. Writer/director Andrew Stanton and his team have created a classic screen character from a metal trash compactor who rides to the rescue of a planet buried in the debris that embodies the broken promise of American life. Not since Chaplin's "
Little Tramp" has so much story—so much emotion—been conveyed without words. When hope arrives in the form of a seedling, the film blossoms into one of the great screen romances as two robots remind audiences of the beating heart in all of us that yearns for humanity—and love—in the darkest of landscapes. At
Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has an
average score of 95 out of 100 based on 39 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average rating of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
IndieWire named
WALL-E the third-best film of the year based on their annual survey of 100 film critics, while Movie City News shows that
WALL-E appeared in 162 different top 10 lists, out of 286 different critics lists surveyed, the most mentions on a top 10 list of any film released in 2008.
Richard Corliss of
Time named
WALL-E his favorite film of 2008 (and later of the decade), noting the film succeeded in "connect[ing] with a huge audience" despite the main characters' lack of speech and "emotional signifiers like a mouth, eyebrows, shoulders, [and] elbows". It "evoke[d] the splendor of the movie past" and he also compared WALL-E and EVE's relationship to the chemistry of
Spencer Tracy and
Katharine Hepburn. Other critics who named
WALL-E their favorite film of 2008 included Tom Charity of
CNN, Michael Phillips of the
Chicago Tribune, Lisa Schwarzbaum of
Entertainment Weekly,
A. O. Scott of
The New York Times,
Christopher Orr of
The New Republic,
Ty Burr and
Wesley Morris of
The Boston Globe,
Joe Morgenstern of
The Wall Street Journal, and
Anthony Lane of
The New Yorker. Todd McCarthy of
Variety called the film "Pixar's ninth consecutive wonder", saying it was imaginative yet straightforward. He said it pushed the boundaries of animation by balancing esoteric ideas with more immediately accessible ones, and that the main difference between the film and other science fiction projects rooted in an
apocalypse was its optimism. Kirk Honeycutt of
The Hollywood Reporter declared that
WALL-E surpassed the achievements of Pixar's previous eight features and was probably their most original film to date. He said it had the "heart, soul, spirit and romance" of the best
silent films. Honeycutt said the film's definitive stroke of brilliance was in using a mix of archive film footage and computer graphics to trigger WALL-E's romantic leanings. He praised Burtt's sound design, saying "If there is such a thing as an aural sleight of hand, this is it."
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times named
WALL-E "an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment, and a decent science-fiction story" and said the scarcity of dialogue would allow it to "cross language barriers" in a manner appropriate to the global theme, and noted it would appeal to adults and children. He praised the animation, describing the color palette as "bright and cheerful … and a little bit realistic", and that Pixar managed to generate a "curious" regard for the WALL-E, comparing his "rusty and hard-working and plucky" design favorably to more obvious attempts at creating "lovable" lead characters. He said
WALL-E was concerned with ideas rather than spectacle, saying it would trigger stimulating "little thoughts for the younger viewers." He named it as one of his twenty favorite films of 2008 and argued it was "the best science-fiction movie in years". The film was interpreted as tackling a topical,
ecologically-minded agenda, Maura Judkis of
U.S. News & World Report questioned whether this depiction of "frighteningly obese humans" would resonate with children and make them prefer to "play outside rather than in front of the computer, to avoid a similar fate". A few notable critics have argued that the film is vastly overrated, claiming it failed to "live up to such blinding, high-wattage enthusiasm", and that there were "chasms of boredom watching it", in particular "the second and third acts spiraled into the expected". Other labels included "preachy" Several
conservative commentators criticized the film.
Shannen W. Coffin of
National Review said that
WALL-E is "leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind"
. Greg Pollowitz of
National Review called the film "a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment".
Jonah Goldberg said that while the film was "fascinating and at-times brilliant", he added that it is also "
Malthusian fear mongering".
Glenn Beck said that "I can't wait to teach my kids how we've destroyed the Earth … Pixar is teaching. I can't wait. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, 'Dad, how come we use so much
styrofoam,' oh, this is the movie for you." Patrick J. Ford of
The American Conservative said
WALL-Es conservative critics missed lessons in the film that he felt appealed to
traditional conservatism. He argued that the mass
consumerism in the film was not shown to be a product of
big business, but of too close a tie between big business and
big government: "The government unilaterally provided its citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth's downfall." Responding to Coffin's claim that the film points out the evils of mankind, Ford argued the only evils depicted were those that resulted from losing touch with our own humanity and that fundamental conservative representations such as the farm, the nuclear family unit, and "wholesome entertainment" were seen as "beautiful and desirable." by the human characters. He concluded, "By steering conservative families away from
WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice." Director
Terry Gilliam praised the film as "A stunning bit of work. The scenes on what was left of planet Earth are just so beautiful: one of the great silent movies. And the most stunning artwork! It says more about ecology and society than any live-action film—all the people on their loungers floating around, brilliant stuff. Their social comment was so smart and right on the button." Archaeologists have commented on the themes of human evolution that the film explores. Ben Marwick has written how the character of WALL-E resembles an archaeologist with his methodical collection and classification of quotidian human artefacts. He is shown facing a typological dilemma of classifying a
spork as either a fork or spoon, and his nostalgic interest in the human past further demonstrated by his attachment to repeated viewings of the 1969 film
Hello, Dolly!. Marwick notes that the film features major human evolutionary transitions such as obligate bipedalism (captain of the spaceship struggles with the autopilot to gain control of the vessel) and the invention of agriculture, as part of watershed moments in the story of the film. According to Marwick, one prominent message of the film "appears to be that the envelopment by technology that the humans in
WALL-E experience paradoxically results in physical and cultural devolution." Scholars such as
Ian Tattersall and
Steve Jones have similarly discussed scenarios where elements of modern technology (such as medicine) may have caused
human evolution to slow or stop. In 2021,
WALL-E became the second Pixar feature film (after
Toy Story), as well as the second animated film in the 21st century after
Shrek, to be selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Accolades WALL-E won the
Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for
Best Original Screenplay,
Best Original Score,
Best Original Song,
Sound Editing, and
Sound Mixing at the
81st Academy Awards. Walt Disney Pictures also pushed for an
Academy Award for Best Picture nomination, but it was not nominated, sparking controversy over whether the Academy deliberately restricted
WALL-E to the Best Animated Feature category. Film critic
Peter Travers remarked, "If there was ever a time where [sic] an animated feature deserved to be nominated for best picture it's ." 1991's
Beauty and the Beast was the first and only animated film nominated for Best Picture at the time. A reflective Stanton stated he was not disappointed the film was restricted to the Best Animated Film nomination because he was overwhelmed by the film's positive reception, and eventually "The line [between live-action and animation] is just getting so blurry that I think with each proceeding year, it's going to be tougher and tougher to say what's an animated movie and what's not an animated movie." the
Chicago Film Critics Association, the Central Ohio Film Critics awards, the
Online Film Critics Society, and most notably the
Los Angeles Film Critics Association, where it became the first animated feature to win the prestigious award. It was named as one of 2008's ten best films by the
American Film Institute and the
National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. It won Best Animated Feature Film at the
66th Golden Globe Awards, 81st Academy Awards, and the
Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards 2008. It was nominated for several awards at the 2009
Annie Awards, including Best Feature Film, Animated Effects, Character Animation, Direction, Production design, Storyboarding and Voice acting (for Ben Burtt); but was beaten out by
Kung Fu Panda in every category. It won Best Animated Feature at the
62nd British Academy Film Awards and was also nominated there for Best Music and Sound.
Thomas Newman and
Peter Gabriel won two
Grammy Awards for "
Down to Earth" and "Define Dancing". It won all three awards it was nominated for by the
Visual Effects Society: Best Animation, Best Character Animation (for WALL-E and EVE in the truck) and Best Effects in the Animated Motion Picture categories. It became the first animated film to win Best Editing for a Comedy or Musical from the
American Cinema Editors. In 2009, Stanton, Reardon, and Docter won the
Nebula Award, beating
The Dark Knight and the
Stargate Atlantis episode "
The Shrine". It won Best Animated Film and was nominated for Best Director at the
Saturn Awards. At the British
National Movie Awards, which is voted for by the public, it won Best Family Film. It was also voted Best Feature Film at the
British Academy Children's Awards. WALL-E was listed at No. 63 on
Empires online poll of the 100 greatest movie characters, conducted in 2008. In early 2010,
Time ranked
WALL-E No. 1 in "Best Movies of the Decade". In
Sight & Sound magazine's 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time,
WALL-E is the second-highest-ranking animated film behind
My Neighbor Totoro (1988), while tying with the film
Spirited Away (2001) at 202nd overall. In a 2016
BBC poll of international critics, it was voted the 29th-greatest film since 2000. In 2021, members of
Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) and
Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) ranked its screenplay 35th in WGA’s 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (so far). In June 2025, actors
Alden Ehrenreich,
David Krumholtz and
Nathan Lane, and comedians
Paula Poundstone and
Phoebe Robinson, all cited the film as among their favorites of the 21st century. It also ranked number 34 on
The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" and number 44 on the "Readers' Choice" edition of the list. In July 2025, it ranked number 47 on
Rolling Stones list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century." == Robotic recreations ==