By the standards of hype surrounding the release of a big summer movie for children, Wall.E, the latest animated film from Pixar (Toy Story), is in a class of its own. In America, even the sour cream of cynical critics are calling it “a masterpiece”. Its success at the American box office — where it has remained near the top of the charts since its release last month — suggests that the public agrees with them. So, as they used to say about the popularity of Elvis, can 50m fans be wrong? Yes.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire Wall.E. I respect it. I appreciate its ambition. I like the way it takes artistic risks and doesn’t pander to audiences’ hunger for films full of cutesy furry characters and furious action. It’s familiar without being formulaic. My problem is this: I just don’t love it.

Why? Because it’s too self-consciously artistic, too tasteful, too eager to be a masterpiece. It’s an animated film buff’s idea of fantastic animation. Directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), it wants to be the 2001: A Space Odyssey of animation. Visually, it sets out to stun, with big, swirling galaxies and aerial views of decayed city landscapes — and it does. But something is missing.

The first half-hour is exceptional. I’ve never seen such a wonderfully downbeat film for kids. The mood is melancholic. An old show tune is playing, with that wobbly, forlorn quality of a song broadcast to a dead civilisation. Against a vast and deserted urban wasteland of rubbish and crumbling skyscrapers, we see the lone figure of Wall.E — a small, rusty robot with binocular-like eyes and caterpillar treads that allow him to zoom around.

He’s been doing the same job for 700 years: scooping up rubbish and pressing it into square cubes, which he stacks up into pointless patterns. Wall.E is the last working robot on earth, cleaning up the mess humanity has left behind. He is a lonely little guy whose only friend is a cockroach. We soon discover that Wall.E is not some mindless robot — he collects treasures from the trash. Like the Little Mermaid, Wall.E is enchanted by the detritus of human civilisation: a plastic fork, a Rubik’s Cube, a string of Christmas lights. Back in his home, we see Wall.E’s prize possession: a video tape of the musical Hello, Dolly!. These foolish, forgotten things have turned this robot into an incurable romantic. He longs for love, someone whose metallic pincers he can hold.

The underlying message of Wall.E is that the human race has forgotten about the things that make it human: songs, dancing, love and, of course, Mother Earth. So far, so very Pixar. There’s a curious paradox at the heart of its world-view that runs from Toy Story to this film. It’s a sense that humanity has fallen, if not from grace, then from a golden age when toys were toys and boys were boys. We have, it seems, lost the good old songs and the good old joys of childhood, abandoned them for the egregious, ephemeral pleasures of a driven corporate culture.

The film’s melancholic mood changes when a probe droid called Eve turns up on earth with a mission of her own. Sleek and chic, Eve looks like a curvaceous egg that any male robot would want to go to work on. She can fly faster than Superman and is equipped with a laser-shooting arm. Watching her in action, Wall.E sighs, as if to say: “Wow, what a girl!” If Eve were human, she’d be Angelina Jolie; if Wall.E were human, he’d be a young, grubby Woody Allen, with those big anxious eyes of his. (Okay, he may not be much to look at, but you can tell the guy is a love machine.) What follows is the charming and comic tale of Wall.E’s attempts to woo Eve.

Except for the odd word and the mechanical twitterings of the two robots, the first part of the film has little in the way of dialogue. It’s a like watching a silent film — and I like the way they haven’t given Wall.E and Eve voices to make audience empathy easier.

In the second half, Eve is scooped up by the mother ship and, followed by a lovesick Wall.E, taken back to Axiom — a leisure-cruiser spaceship that is owned and run by a global corporation called Buy n Large. It’s here that humanity now resides, and we get a satirical, Aldous Huxley-like swipe at the brave, bloated world of future leisure.

Here, the human race spend their days floating on comfy chairs, talking to each other via computers — even when next to each other — and having every whim catered to by service pods. Consequently, humanity has evolved into a race of obese babies who are incapable of doing anything for themselves. It’s a none too subtle critique of corporate leisure and advertising that aims to keep people passive and consuming. On top of that, we get the whole eco-lecture about the forgotten joys of life on earth — grass and dancing and having a song in your heart.

The trouble with the second half of the film is that it seems to have been written by sci-fi nerds who can’t imagine that other people are not fascinated by space, spaceships and all things robotic. Despite the presence of human characters (Jeff Garlin from Curb Your Enthusiasm plays the Axiom’s captain), there’s nobody we can connect with.

When all the critical ravings die down, I wonder whether, in 10 years’ time, Wall.E will be as popular as, say, The Little Mermaid or Toy Story are today? I doubt it. The film is cute, but ultimately the characters aren’t as impressive as the scenery.

Wall.E: U, 103 mins

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