Playing with Emotion

I can get weepy watching "Babe," reading Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," or listening to "I'll Be Home For Christmas." But not a single game has ever toyed with my tear ducts. Games look great, sound great and play great. But they are not emotional.

Now here comes "WALL-E," the video game based on Disney-Pixar's summer film about a garbage-cleaning robot in the future. The plot: Since people fled stinky Earth to live in space, they left behind WALL-E and millions of other robots to organize garbage so people can return to a fresh world, someday.

The moment that almost makes me tear up arrives early in the game. WALL-E -- a wheel-legged little guy with robot eyes and arms -- comes in contact with a female robot named EVE, who has flown to the planet briefly for a purpose. Then, she begins to leave.

As EVE's spaceship prepares for liftoff, WALL-E -- the last, working garbage-cleaning robot in the world -- goes back to his lonesome task. He looks up at the shaking ship and begins to call for EVE not to leave. He sprints to the rocket on his wheels, wailing something akin to "goodbye" and "don't go."

This is a heartbreak, sumptuously crafted and musically scored, delivered as pixels, as created here by the Pixar talents and the game's designers. I came thisclose to losing it. Why?

WALL-E, with a spark of human sadness in his eyes, is the embodiment of animism, the innocent notion that souls or spirits live not just in humans but in animals as well as inanimate objects, ranging from boxes to rocks to robots.

You've seen animism in the robots of "Star Wars" and other sci-fi flicks, as well as the "Toy Story" toys, the boy and the teddy bear in "Artificial Intelligence," any Disney movie with a talking teapot, any "Harry Potter" film with a killer tree, and in the evil-animism films of "The Car," "Christine," "The Shining" and the "Evil Dead" series.

"WALL-E's" romanticized animism succeeds on philosophical levels. There's an allusion to the "ghost in the machine," since EVE is shaped like Casper the ghost and travels with WALL-E the machine. There's EVE's name, of course, paralleling the Adam-like solitude of male "WALL-E."

And commerce is brutally satirized as a destructive force. Wherever WALL-E goes on Earth, or on spaceships, he hears overhead announcements of sales pitches: "If you're not happy, you're not consuming!" When humans show up, they are obese and sitting robotlike in shopping carts.

These thoughtful deliberations are put to good use since "WALL-E's" game play is entertaining, breezy and fairly addictive. As WALL-E, you roll across garbage heaps, past dust storms, through spaceships and even zip around in outer space. It can be repetitive as you grab square blocks of trash and throw them at robots and other creatures that want to harm you.

But the repetition is overwhelmed by the beauty of the science of art, with lovely changes of scenery; sleek movements of WALL-E; well-borrowed game play from "Star Wars," "Frogger," "Asteroids" and other classics; and an extraordinary and melancholy music score that plays on your psyche.

It is a rare, humanistic adventure starring robots who seem human, and humans who seem robotic. It yearns for you to break free of a compartmentalized world, detached and depressed, for even if you have been left alone, you are not alone. Just look. Look at all this splendor before you, and breathe it in.

("WALL-E" retails for $50 for PS 3, Wii, Xbox 360; $30 for PS 2, PSP, DS -- Plays fairly addictive. Looks great. Challenging. Rated "E" for cartoon violence. Four stars out of four.)