The folks at Pixar have created a filmmaker’s utopia. Working almost entirely without obstruction, they’ve established a work ethic in which artistic integrity is of primary importance, and where a personal vision is given room to flourish. It is an auteur’s paradise—never before has a studio placed so much faith in individual imagination. Each new film has a different feel compliant with the quirks of its director. (Hence, The Incredibles, though clearly the handiwork of many talented craftsmen, is distinctly Brad Birdian both for its aggressive nostalgia and its emphasis on the nuclear family.)

Pixar’s latest project also bears the unmistakable stamp of individuality. The writer-director is Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), and he’s fashioned an entirely worthy hero-cum-artistic-foil in WALL·E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), a lonesome robot with binoculars for eyes and the soul of a romantic. To see him is to love him.

Along with a resilient cockroach, WALL·E is the sole inhabitant of a parched Planet Earth some 800 years in the future. Completely inundated with trash, the human populace has retreated into deep space aboard massive luxury ships while a mechanical maintenance crew (of which WALL·E represents the last) labors to tidy the mess. An acceptable apocalyptic scenario, and a teasingly plausible one.

When he’s not compacting mounds of garbage into small, rectangular cubes, WALL·E is building up his collection of discarded knickknacks and reviewing a battered copy of Hello, Dolly! (apparently the only movie he could dredge up, poor guy). When another robotic visitor, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), descends from the heavens looking for signs of life, WALL·E is entranced. He’s a shopworn PC, all rusty hinges and boxlike limbs, and she, with her smooth alabaster body and sky-blue eyes, resembles nothing so much as a sexy Mac. Together they embark on a corny romance that takes them out of earth’s orbit and into a less interesting movie.

The first 40 minutes or so are an example of what some critics might lazily refer to as “pure cinema.” To wit, a reliance on intrinsically filmic devices (framing, editing, etc.) rather than expositional dialogue to push the story forward. (Only a cameo by a live-action Fred Willard, as a Bush-like world leader, constitutes a cheat.) And the diamond-hard, lustrous, obsessively detailed visuals are equal to Pixar’s impossible high standards. Taken as distinct from the rest of the movie, this enthralling opener ranks with the best work they’ve ever done.

But it’s not to last. The second half reveals the film’s biggest secret—the human race has regressed into a tribe of corpulent, terminally lazy couch potatoes, forever glued to their recliners (which prompts the question of how they manage to procreate). The consumerist nature of their lifestyle (the spaceship is monopolized by a Wal-Mart-ish corporation called Buy n Large) allows for several broad swipes at contemporary society, like one of those Twilight Zone episodes that finds Rod Serling in a preachy mood.

And so WALL·E loses a little something in impact. As satire, it’s not pointed enough to pierce the conscience, and as sentiment, it falls back on the old cliché of having the nonhuman characters more charitable than the human ones. The film is not calculatedly condescending, yet, in attempting to “show the way,” one fears the Pixar people have become a tad didactic.

That said, I still recommend the film highly. From beginning to end, WALL·E runs along with the smoothness of a well-oiled assembly line. There isn’t a single lazy or poorly rendered frame to be found. One only hopes that in the future, the filmmakers would resist the urge point a bony finger in the direction of the audience.

It’s also worth noting that WALL·E is preceded by another fine Pixar short, Presto, about an arrogant magician and his neglected pet rabbit, who exacts vengeance on opening night. Exuberantly violent, it resembles Tex Avery’s cartoon Magical Maestro in both premise and execution.