Wall-E

Pixar knows how to make a fucking movie. Ever since Toy Story, Pixar has consistently produced animated films that are enthralling to kids, enrapturing to adults, chock full of powerful themes, vivid characters, clock-work physical comedy and rousing action. Films like Toy Story 2, The Incredibles and Ratatouille are all-time animated classics. But, with Wall-E, the Pixar team, helmed by director Andrew Stanton, has created a completely unique, hauntingly powerful piece of pop art.

Seven hundred years after humanity abandons a trash-strewn, poisoned earth, Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Model, or "Wall-E," carries out his mission of turning massive piles of garbage int compact, orderly cubes, long after the rest of his robotic comrades have powered down. Hundreds of years of rooting through the detritus of civilization has given Wall-E an intimate knowledge of society, and his mimicry of human behavior has morphed, over time, into the makings of an authentic personality. Part of that personality is a yearning for interpersonal connection that explodes into intense longing when a hovering, ipod-like probe called EVE arrives on earth searching for signs of organic life. Neither robot can speak, so their tentative courtship is dramatized in wordless rituals, the boiled-down essence of romantic bonding. The result is rarest sort of cinematic alchemy, scenes that are involving, funny, and most impressively, offer insights into just what it means to be human, what we need from other people, and how we go about loving them.

As if it weren't enough that Wall-E offers soul-stirring transcendent peons to love, there's also powerfully hilarious satire of corporate stupefaction when the 'bots end up running around on the massive cruise ship in space where earthlings have been living since the environment death of earth. The image of morbidly obese, unitarded folks zipping around obliviously on hover-chairs along lighted pathways, drinking their dinners from giant cups, surrounded by a blur of video screens is cutting and funny in the bittersweet way of knife-trenchant observation. In between moving scenes of Wall-E and EVE and Pixar's particular brand of frothy, kinetic comedy, Stanton and company put together a bracing critique of modern techo-complacency and a rousing call for all of us to renew and enrich our relationships with each other and the world around us.

All of these subtly evocative touches of humanity and piercing social commentary, have a cumulative effect that makes the film's climax wrenching and harrowing and finally blissfully life-affirming. It's a singular accomplishment: a mass audience blockbuster that conveys a authentic emotions, a poignant call to conscience living, and the sheer power to leave the audience with a heightened sense of what it means to love and be loved.

Score: 9.4