Pixar’s new movie Ratatouille comes out in a few weeks, but their next project has been stirring up rumors on the net for at least a year now. It’s called Wall-E, and it’s been mostly shrouded in complete secrecy, until now.

Today, before my press screening of Ratatouille, Pixar unveiled their first Wall-E teaser trailer. It begins with an introduction by Andrew Stanton, in which he talks about the early days of Pixar following the success of Toy Story. Stanton tells the story of how he, and three others of the company’s founding creative fathers (including tragically deceased Joe Ranft) met to discuss what they’d do after Pixar. They came up with four ideas, three of which eventually became the now classic films A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. The fourth was a favorite of Ranft’s, and that’s Wall-E.

The teaser then shows a brief snippet of footage from the film, with a narrated explanation. The camera pans to show the saddest, tiny robot you’ve ever seen collecting garbage on a flat, empty planet underneath a huge, starry sky. The cute little robot picks up garbage, compresses it, and deposits it in cubes as a narrator talks about how he’s faithfully done his job for 700 years, but never found his true purpose… until now. The robot looks up at the stars, and the title “Wall-E” flashes across the screen, and is then said by a heavily synthesized, sort of squeaky robotic voice which sounds like it’s not used to speaking. This is probably the little robot Wall-E.

The teaser trailer seems to confirm just about all of the rumors we’ve heard about the movie. The animation has a sad and wistful quality to it, but is hard to judge since they only show such a small piece of it. Since I saw it before my screening of Ratatouille, don’t be surprised if this same teaser is attached to the film when it arrives in theaters on June 29th. Like anything Pixar does, I can’t wait to see more of what they’re up to with Wall-E. This was just an appetite wetter.