In a recent interview, "Wall-E" director Andrew Stanton was asked to name some of his favorite films. Topping the list was "Lawrence of Arabia," followed by "The Lion in Winter," "Cool Hand Luke," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and several others. "Hey," Stanton said, "there's no animation in my top ten." For most people, this wouldn't be a surprise. Stanton, on the other hand, was one of the first two animators to join the Pixar team; you would think he'd at least give a shout-out to "Snow White," or "Fantasia," or "Pinocchio." Yet, paradoxically, Stanton's list provides a look into what makes "Wall-E" - and the wide majority of Pixar's output to this point - so extraordinary. They make films that, like those Disney classics, transcend categorization as animated movies. The movies are animated, of course, and stunningly so; there's no question that Pixar remains on the cutting edge of technology. But these are films, plain and simple, and they never forget to pay homage and respect to the past even while paving the way to the future. The forebears here are the films of comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and Stanton and his animators have created a character to match up with those men's screen personas.

The last remaining robot on an Earth that, as the film opens, has been abandoned by humans for over 700 years, WALL-E (an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class) spends his days gathering and compacting the piles of waste that have rendered the planet uninhabitable. "Wall-E" introduces us to its hero and his surroundings through a 40-minute, nearly dialogue-free opening that is, in its way, every bit as stunning as the silent first act of Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood." Designed with the assistance of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins ("No Country for Old Men"), this sequence has the pure visual expressiveness of silent cinema and, in its wittily choreographed physical humor, evokes the graceful slapstick of Chaplin and Keaton. Can a robot have a soul? WALL-E, with his deeply expressive eyes and human concerns, suggests the affirmative. He collects interesting trinkets, watches a worn copy of "Hello, Dolly!" religiously and longs for companionship beyond the single cockroach he keeps as a friend.

Enter EVE, a sleek white robot sent to Earth to search for biological life, with whom WALL-E falls head-over-heels for. When EVE returns to her home base, a massive interstellar luxury cruiser known as the Axiom, WALL-E stows aboard to stay close to his new love. The relationship between WALL-E and EVE provides a romantic core to the second half of the film, which takes place on the Axiom. The ship that provided the human race a way to escape from their inhospitable home, the Axiom's design draws influence from Chaplin's "Modern Times" and the sterile metropolises of Tati. The simple beauty of the film's first forty minutes gives way to the inspired chaos that marked earlier Pixar efforts like "Toy Story."

Stanton imagines a world where mankind has been rendered so passive by their reliance on commercialized technology (represented here by Buy 'n' Large, a Wal-Mart stand-in that seems to have taken over every aspect of life on Earth) that even walking has become unthinkable. The Axiom's citizens are grotesque, nearly-boneless slabs of flesh that float around on moving chairs and drink liquidized meals through straws. It's a clever look at the future of our current culture, and combined with the images of the earth as an uninhabitable waste-land, it forms the basis of the film's political message. As an engagement with our current political situation, it's unusual stuff for a kid's movie (there's even video footage of Fred Willard as Earth's CEO/president, a bumbling fool who urges citizens to "stay the course," which is admittedly kind of a cheap shot), and although it can't help but feel like some sort of letdown after the almost otherworldly beauty of the film's first act, it represents a level of intellectual and satirical ambition unmatched by Pixar's previous works.

It is also, with the possible exception of "Toy Story 2," the most emotionally involving film Pixar has made to date. It's no mean feat to evoke feelings for machines, but Stanton goes even farther than that; WALL-E and EVE are among the most sympathetic characters to have appeared in an animated feature. Once the Axiom returns to Earth, so do the film's aesthetic strategies; dialogue disappears, and WALL-E and EVE's relationship takes center stage once more. And as the film closes, silently and in moving homage to Chaplin's "City Lights," Stanton reminds us that sometimes we say the most when we aren't saying anything at all.