1) WALL·E (2008)
Here it is: the game-changer of game-changers. A movie that doesn’t speak a word for one-third of its run-time and has more to say than most do in two hours. Stocking Pixar’s most unconventionally endearing character — essentially a sentient trash compactor more obsessed with Hello, Dolly! than any human has ever been — and detailing at first his friendship with a cockroach, then an angsty, gleaming interloper named EVE, and eventually with all of mankind, WALL·E doesn’t just chug along from one scene to the next, it becomes meteoric. Pixar, at its heart, represents the marriage between kid and adult entertainment that can speak to a child one year — and to that same child in twenty years, surprising them with different ideas each time they revisit the movie.
In my opinion, WALL·E is the complete summation of that idea. Kids appreciate the titular robot’s antics as he bounces from one trash skyscraper to the next, and as they grow up they see the bigger picture: the consumerism, the environmental disaster, the apocalyptic nightmare that had to occur to even set the story in motion. Some argue the final acts weaken the movie’s ideas, but I’d say they only strengthen and add to them — humanity’s laziness and gluttony finally catching up with us in the end.
It’s got a typical villain and a rushed finale, but it spins and pirouettes into transcendence so many times that its occasional touches back to Earth are only understandable, and it’s soon back off into the stars. Oh, and the tentative, and eventually tenderhearted, romance between WALL·E and EVE is Pixar’s greatest love story, bar none. And neither speaks a full sentence.