Wall-E is an amazing film.
There is no doubt about that.
In fact, it may well be one of the highpoints of animation, alongside the heights of Fantasia - AFAIK, animators have been dreaming about a full-length Hollywood movie that solely uses animation and sound (no dialogue) to push the story along for decades.
And (other than the humans-on-spaceship denouement) they got it with Wall-E. And as an added bonus, it is amazingly well-received.
However, as a film (and not an avante-garde film-school test pilot), I think Wall-E is not quite up to par with the majority of their past successes.
It is better than Cars by a long mile, and even better than Bug's Life, but it doesn't reach Toy Story I/II, Finding Nemo, Monster's Inc, or even close to Incredibles territory. (I do reserve the right to watch and appreciate it on DVD to judge Wall-E fairly in this regard)
What Wall-E has over every other film (including Toy Story I, which was all new ground) is the
experimental nature of it - they truly were in command of the whole repetoire of filmmaking with Wall-E, and it showed me they can do ANYthing on film.
Seriously, from dialog-less movie to simple shapes and sounds conveying emotional dialog to mind-blowing detail and realisticness (some shots looked like live action - even better (more real-looking) post-apocalyptic cityscapes than I Am Legend!) to 70's-era sci-fi to 8-bit title credits, PIXAR showed they can do anything they set their targets on.
What amazed/shocked me about Wall-E is that PIXAR somehow got this 21st century, jaded society to somehow buy into a 60's-70's era scifi storyline.
The solo man-out-of-time/space that encounters a different being and proceeds to be thrust into another society and affects change thru his unique perspective is almost hippy-like and AFAIK a staple of early/mid sci-fi themes. I thought they stopped making those kinds of films in Hollywood after Enemy Mine.
I'm surprised Wall-E didn't die thru his sacrifice, but of course in a family movie that wouldn't do - but that's what the classic version of this story would have had, make no mistake.
The wonderful thing about PIXAR and Wall-E's success is that it shows pencil-necked Hollywood bean-counters that an audience doesn't have to be treated like imbecilic short-attention-spanned plebians.
Truly, a wonderful film that showed be seen, appreciated, and enjoyed by as many open-minded people as possible.
