There's also no such thing as a perfect movie, but Wall-E comes pretty damn close.
I guess I'll go with the unconventional and start off with things that could be perceived as flaws:
Humans.
Dialogue.
Formulaic children's ending.
Not enough Mo.
Initially, I thought this was going to be a movie about robots and only robots. You know, like how Cars did away with the notion of human drivers. Imagine my surprise when Wall-E chases Eve into a gigantic space Ark housing all of Earth's current population, complete with speaking parts and major roles in the plot. Ultimately, Pixar and Stanton make a strong case for the humans in this movie, as they are pretty much crucial to one of the important themes and do provide some of the funniest and most poignant moments.
Still, I can't help but wonder how interesting it would have been if Wall-E had encountered an abandoned Axiom, leaving the fate of humanity ambiguous. The thought of Wall-E's adventures ocurring in a haunted ship in space...well, I guess that could have gone very wrong. Maybe Stanton made the right choice here. Like I said, the humans directly address the important message: you're letting the establishment do your thinking for you.
Basically, what Wall-E does is the classic "putting a robot protagonist next to a human to point out the irony in the robot being more human" trick, but it does it wonderfully. All of this said, I do wish they had A LOT more robots. Probably one of the most hysterical scenes is in the robot ward and the subsequent release of the dysfunctional sidekick droids.
Still, it's a testament that the movie left me actually craving more zaniness. The general trend in American "family films" tends to be "let's max out the crazy to get those kids laughing in the short term" and it ends up being about as funny as an ADD kid dying of a heart attack after eating too many Twizzlers.
....To clarify, that's not very funny at all.
Rather than going this route, Wall-E, against convention, determinedly chases down a thriller plot of technological deception and a quest to reclaim the concept of humanity. It could have stuck to goofy beeps, boops and mushy inter-robotic foreplay and still won the hearts of moviegoers, but it made the movie important, damn it. And that's one of the things I like most about it.
That said, Wall-E cannot escape certain constraints of the American family film. I think many animation fans across the Internet (I think I'm going to start using "the Internet" as a substitute for "the world," because, let's face it, who really gets out into the world anymore) would have liked to see a studio ballsy enough to release a multimillion dollar SILENT 3D movie. The first act of the movie convinced me that I wouldn't need any words spoken by the main characters to make this satisfying.
Disney would have blown a gasket. So, instead, Stanton provided hysterical, theme-relevant conversations, so he made up for it, I guess, but I was hoping for more elements of silent movie magic, harkening back to the old Merry Melodies and (ironically) Disney cartoons without speech.
And then there's the way the movie deals with death and its consequences. I feel like I've seen or heard of international family films that acknowledge the fact that main characters Can Die. As the international movie industry increasingly tends to mimic Hollywood, that concept is probably becoming more and more diminished, but certainly it crosses minds, doesn't it? Still, I think there are fewer nightmares for a movie producer than the image of a mom trying to console a blubbering 3-year-old walking out of the theater. They're not buying that DVD.
But Wall-E could have blown everyone away with its ending...
SPOILERS.
I knew Eve would revive Wall-E at the end. It would be unfathomable for him to actually commit an Honest Sacrifice and get reduced to a metal pancake. But when he wakes up and fails to recognize Eve, my eyes widened in shock. I mean, he was an outright DICK to her, giving her the cold shoulder and going about his business. Could it be that the movie would actually end with a somber fact of life? No, of course not. I'll admit, it was cute and made my internal fictive girlfriend sigh in pleasure when Wall-E and Eve finally hold hands and kiss, reviving his memory. But it's such a sidestep of another important lesson: Sometimes the person you love will forget you. The important thing is to remember to keep loving despite that. Giving kids unrealistic expectations that an Ex is going to suddenly come back from loveless oblivion is begging for a massive demand in therapy when they come of age.
END SPOILERS.
The movie does manage to surprise with its blatant (and accurate, I might add) implication that Wal-Mart is going to destroy humanity as we know it. Now, if you've been reading the hiccup of controversy it's generated, you'll have seen that Stanton claims that his movie is "just a love story."
I'm sorry, but when you have the omnipresence of a conglomerate that has managed to sink its logo into every aspect of human life and produce mass amounts of human waste, you know what you're doing. And you're a damn hero for doing it, Andrew Stanton! The opening scenes are the hardest hitters, displaying a world that I can actually believe we're heading toward. The flickering remains of the Buy N' Large commercials are important satires of our gullibility and increasing tendency of handing over our lives to a Brand.
Certain conservative pundits, laughably, are warning families not to bring their children to this liberal filth. Because a healthy dose of environmentalism automatically means your child will begin to idolize Al Gore and his politics. Listen, if your father's a gun-totin', Ford drivin', Wal-Mart goin', soccer-hatin', patriotic ex-marine, I don't think the image of a plant in a boot full of dirt is suddenly going to turn you into Keith Olberman.
But for the record, the world might be better off if it could.
Besides, Stanton is right. As intentional as the message was, the real story to all of this is the story of Wall-E and Eve. I have to admit, I don't have a record of dabbling with machinery, but Eve is pretty cute. She's as sleek as an iMac (Joanthan Ive designed her) and the deadly laser adds a dominatrix sexiness element. Also, Elissa Knight is already cute as a human being, but when you add those synthesizers to her crooning...sigh. Fortunately, most kids won't react this way and if they do, they probably, like me, won't get to reproduce, so the planet is safe from legions of Extraterristrial Vegetation Evaluator fantasizers.
The point is, the filmmakers did a brilliant job at depicting the relationship between the two robots. The imagery here is just beautiful. Astounding. Every speck of animating blood was put to work to make viewers root for these two. And it's the type of craft that makes me admit something I shouldn't comfortable putting on a blog that discusses comic book movies and Angelina Jolie's rear-end...
Love is vital. That robot's life was nothing more than the repetition of a single command day in and day out. Think of how many people you know who only do as they're told, on schedule, without any purpose beyond achieving the next preprogrammed level of productivity. It's Eve that takes Wall-E somewhere he never would have gone otherwise, that gives him the opportunity to touch the freakin' rings of Saturn and lead an entire race to their destiny.
And I'm not saying that your life is worthless if you haven't found love in someone who makes your gaskets twirl and your optical lenses widen. God knows there's less and less people out there worth sharing a network with, let alone remote accessing. But you've got to love something, otherwise you'll end up living out the rest of your days fulfilling someone else's...
Directive.
And that's the physics of that.
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