WALL-E Andrew Stanton

As much as Pixar deserves the exceptional praise they have earned, Andrew Stanton's WALL-E stands as their greatest acheivement.  A melancholy romance which uses space and scorched earth as breathtaking visualizations of loneliness, this is the rare Big Studio Movie that dares reach for a Kubrickian awe.  No movie has utilized space as a poetic pallate as well since 2001.

The deep loneliness of our titular protagonist makes his romantic triumph all the more gratifying, particularly in and ingenius dance among the stars that hits the perfection of the classic Hollywood musical WALL-E fixates on.  Also, he's a robot as you probably know.  The machines in this movie hit an emotional purity that is pointedly lacking (at least initially) in the human characters.

People, having left a polluted earth some 700 years ago, now live in an obese sort of catatonia, hypersaturated by consumerist media noise to the point of mindless splendor.  It stands in sharp contrast to the patient robot sequences, and humanity's awakening from its ad supported slumber compliments the digital love story perfectly.

WALL-E is a family film in the best sense, in that it can uplift viewers of any age not only with the beauty of its story, but also how it is told.  The mostly wordless tone of long stretches is not only more understandable to its youngest audiences, it also probably makes them smarter.  The language and reach of patient, sublime sound and light here is like an antidote to the Bruckheimerisms that have turned adult audiences into the kind of fat info zombies WALL-E satirizes.  This film has cinematic beauty from Buster Keaton to Stanley Kubrick in its DNA, and pure passionate emotion to express with it.