WALL-E: A

It's a romantic comedy, an action-adventure, a satire, an ecological/post-apocalyptic fable, and a silent movie that blossoms into a space opera about a tiny tin bucket on wheels who is very much alive -- in every sense of the word. He is WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth Class), and he's the star of WALL-E (you know, the latest Pixar film that got such massive descriptive space above); and he's also its beeping, chirping, purring, whirring soul. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton, WALL-E is about a robot whose only function is to compact the trash that has covered the Earth -- and it's a job he's been doing for 700 years. But when his tiniest of glitches (he's developed a personality) leads him on an inter-galactic adventure with what just may be the love of his life, well...that's when things really start to get interesting.

This is where, however, I must re-define the word "interesting," because the second half of WALL-E is interesting only in contrast to its first forty-five minutes because it features dialogue -- that's right, the first act of Stanton's film is almost wholly silent -- which is to say it's no more enthralling than it was to start; and no less enthralling than any other masterpiece released by what may well be the single most skilled studio in all of Hollywood.

We open on a rusty city compromised of skyscrapers made of trash, the detritus itself having been stacked by the last remaining robot on the face of the planet: our hero, WALL-E (Ben Burtt, the audio engineer who gave us the bleeps of R2-D2). The intrepid little guy, who looks like a pair of droopy binoculars stacked on an orange rubics-cube, has gone on now alone for quite some time, so he's appropriately lonely, and his appropriately lonely exploits -- he's a sad-sack office drone with no hope of a lunch break -- fill the first thirty minutes. All he has for company is his indestructible cockroach sidekick, an old VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!, and a sleek off-white robot named EVE who may just fall in love with him...or incinerate him. Or both.

This set-up segues flawlessly after another ten or fifteen minutes into a satirical romp aboard the space-station where humans have now lived for nearly a millenia -- the plot now being dominated less by the silent wonders of trash compacting and more with trying to re-instill the urge to live in what are, essentially, a bunch of big technophilic infants. Both acts have their merits, and as previously stated only the second contains any sort of enduring conversation, but for my money what WALL-E does with its opening is pretty bloody brilliant. Silence transfuses the landscape, save for the occasional click-or-clack from our mechanical buddy, but so too does wonder, awe, and beauty. Stanton, who previously helmed the equally exquisite Finding Nemo, strips down the art of cinema in those first thirty minutes to an essence of extreme delicacy, wit, and skill; he turns the comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin into trascendent art.

That same notion of primal passion well-informs the sensibilities of the last hour, as Pixar's most pointed satire -- our mass consumerism will eventually swallow us as we demand more to swallow -- focuses more and more in on the search for home, and for re-birth. But that's just one of the main plots. The other is, of course, the robot love story. And in that, too, silence and its totemic power are key; nary a coherent sentence is formed between EVE and WALL-E but their ardor will, by film's end, bring a lump to your throat.

Seeing the astonishing achievements of this lastest marvel (all the ways it could have veered off course, been then rightly called a "stunt," but didn't), many have called WALL-E Pixar's greatest feat -- and well it may be. Looking back, I'm quickly enamored with Brad Bird's The Incredibles which so perfectly put so many familial, live-action, dramas to shame with less running time and twice as much verve and wit; and, of course, Toy Story and Finding Nemo set milestones for the animation house on the cultural map (all worthily so). But is it true -- Andrew Stanton's film (which he co-wrote with Jim Capobianco) is miraculous, but is it The Miracle? It's a wondrous comedy; a spectacle of synthetic beauty crafted to propel wholly organic universal sentiments; and a romantic adventure plotted with enough engrossing skill to rival anything produced in a live-action arena. There is true cinema magic in the film's workings, truly brilliant purity and heart, so I suppose, in a word, "yes." Or as our protagonist himself would say, "boop."