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He’s under 2ft tall even when standing on the tips of his caterpillar tracks. He has ridiculously expressive binocular eyes, a taste for the corniest musicals that humanity has produced and a cheerfully indestructible pet cockroach. Meet WALL-E, the last little robot left on Earth and your companion for 90 minutes of cinematic bliss.

WALL-E or Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class, to give him his full name, is the eponymous star of the latest film from the Pixar studio (home of Toy Story, The Incredibles and Finding Nemo). WALL-E, written and directed by Andrew Stanton, the man behind Nemo, is yet more proof that, in terms of animation technology and dazzling inventiveness, there is no other company that is even in the same league. Come to that, there’s not likely to be another entry in the overheated summer movie market that has WALL-E’s unabashed, old-fashioned romanticism and — a rather bleak view of the future of the planet notwithstanding — its ultimate optimism.

Excitement about WALL-E, which is screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival next week, has been building to fever pitch in the blogosphere, with some commentators drawing parallels with timeless classic family films such as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and The Wizard of Oz. These are lofty claims to be making so early in the movie’s life, and yet the film does bear some essential similarities to its antecedents — perhaps in the sweet-natured innocence of the story and the unabashed, heartstring-tugging sentimentality.

It does seem that the alchemists at Pixar have come up with pure gold this time. The irony is that this film has been described by some as the biggest risk that Pixar has taken.

One of the factors that makes the film so different, and consequently more of a box-office risk, is the fact that, for the first 30 minutes at least, it’s devoid of dialogue. Or rather, it’s devoid of human dialogue: the lonely robot chatters to himself and his cockroach buddy in bleeps and rattles (the sound design is by the legendary Ben Burtt, who worked on ET and Star Wars). He also appears to be able to hum along to his favourite songs from a well-worn Betamax copy of Hello, Dolly!. But far from being an impediment, the lack of dialogue is a creative release for the film-makers. The visual humour of every frame is fine-tuned, and in WALL-E’s guileless goggle eyes we can read his every thought. Part-ET, part-R2D2, part-Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, with an expressive physicality and pathos worthy of Chaplin, this rusting little cube of tin is a silent movie star.

Another early worry about the film was that it is that little bit harder to persuade an audience to empathise with an inanimate object, however expert the animation. The clunky 2005 Fox film Robots was cited as evidence, as was Pixar’s only mis-step so far, Cars. But if the talents at Pixar can invest a desk lamp with a personality — Luxo Jr. was the first Pixar short and went on to be incorporated into the company logo — creating an engaging little robot with a big heart would prove to be no problem.

Although WALL-E might be just a glorified trash compactor on caterpillar tracks, Stanton makes him the very antithesis of the cold, programmed robot. After 700 years of sifting and studying the rubbish that human beings left behind when they evacuated Earth, the robot has absorbed the traits that humankind is in danger of losing for ever. But, since WALL-E learnt about love through the cheesiest of Hollywood musicals, he’s a sentimentalist, in love with the idea of love, preferably accompanied by a swelling orchestral soundtrack. Inside his metal chest is pure slush.

WALL-E is an engaging little fellow, but the credit for his imminent world domination is not his alone. The brilliant marketing campaign — which started last year with an initial trailer that ran before Ratatouille and continued through a series of teasers showing the inquisitive WALL-E meeting a vacuum cleaner, a magnet and a fire extinguisher — has ensured that a sizeable chunk of the prospective audience has already fallen hard for the little robot before they have even seen the film.

- WALL-E is on general release from July 18

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