WALL•E was Pixar’s ninth animated feature, so by then everyone knew Pixar meant quality. The studio’s secret was preproduction—years of preproduction—including more and deeper consideration of script, characterization, and imagery than any other popular filmmaking entity. Which makes the people at Pixar, with both the time and the means to think, perhaps the freest and most reflective filmmakers on the planet—the Stanley Kubricks of animation.

Did you think I was being pretentious when I invoked Viktor Frankl in an appraisal of WALL•E? I was not. The vast, empty spaces of WALL•E’s world—often, literally, the black, endless universe all around him (and us)—are day in and day out elevated by the peppy tunes of his favorite composer, the only composer he knows: Jerry Herman. And that ain’t Cole Porter. I don’t want to speak for Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, but my guess is that if the great psychiatrist were stranded with Hello, Dolly!, he’d make the same choice: Love or die. And do it fast, because the clock is ticking.

In other words, WALL•E could have been a Samuel Beckett character, trapped and bored, but Beckett didn’t believe in love or meaning. So WALL•E is Charlie Chaplin. Both Chaplin and Beckett start with the same question—What am I, a cosmic tramp, going to do with all this time and space?—but where Beckett answers with madness, Chaplin (like WALL•E) answers with wonder: What if I stuck two forks into these bread rolls and made dancing feet?

It’s the wonder of things—it’s there if you look.

The silent-cinema pioneers knew this—what WALL•E knows, what Stanton and the incredible whole of the Pixar team know: that wordless expression brings the world together. It’s not the fact that WALL•E is a “family film,” a term I hate—I saw The Piano Teacher with my family (we’re fine, by the way)—that makes it for everyone; it’s because it’s made, eloquently, in the only universal language: film.

What pedantic filmmakers who want to impart a political message miss—that it is form, the seat of the soul, and not the earthly realm of content, that allows us to transcend our differences—Stanton understands. That’s why every overindulged human aboard the spaceship Axiom, which has been in orbit for seven hundred years, is soul-sucked to their personal smart screens. The satirical prescience here is obvious, even more so today than when WALL•E came out; we humans, whether by TV or phone or computer, have been made into the real robots. But the humane fullness of Stanton’s idea is deeper than that; in going from WALL•E’s expansive world of film to the Axiom’s world of personal screens, we have gone from a world of wonder to a world of addiction. How can you discover what’s out there when you’re looking in a mirror all day?

“I didn’t know we had a pool!” exclaims Mary, one of the ship’s human passengers, when WALL•E accidentally knocks her from her life of e-solipsism. Go ahead, laugh, it’s funny—but laugh at yourself too: until WALL•E, you never really looked at a spork.

That’s why these people are moved around in “hoverchairs” and their bodies are shapeless blobs. It’s not just because they are Americans (though don’t kid yourself, they can’t be anything else); it’s because they have been up in space for so long, allowing themselves to be distracted, with predigested entertainment and “fun,” from the fact that their home planet has been destroyed, that they no longer have ideals or a sense of value—they consume everything. A spiritual being, like WALL•E, makes choices.

Make choices, Stanton is saying. Look—really look—with binocular eyes. Watch the movie that’s going on around you. And to be clear, it is a movie. It’s not television. All those allusions buried in and on the surface of WALL•E—Alien, THX 1138, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Chaplin—are to movies, my human friends. They are made with awareness of form and wonder, and are meant not to be streamed small but experienced large. (Even WALL•E understands the value of proper exhibition. He “projects” Hello, Dolly! from his iPod! And the captain of the Axiom discovers the lost wonders of Earth on a very, very big screen!) Stanton speaks to us in movies, I would bet, for the same reason that WALL•E gives Hello, Dolly! to EVE. He’s saying, “I’m a filmmaker, I don’t use words, but this is me inside. Is this you?” Yes, Andrew—it’s us. We, too, are awed by Kubrick and Chaplin—we are humans. We say, with dumbstruck love, “Whoooooaaaaaaahhh . . .”

Look outside your window, Mary. “Oh, so many stars . . .” And what else? WALL•E and EVE, having just had their first kiss, dancing a flying space duet against the big, black, inviting universe. Then suddenly—

“Hey! Hey,” Mary waves to the robots. Overcome, she backs into some guy, literally knocks him out of his screen daze.

“Wha—what?”

“Look at that!” she swoons.

He looks through the window—a giant, anamorphic line of window frames as wide as space. “Hey, I know that guy. Hey, WALL•E!”

“Hi, WALL•E!”

“WALL•E, it’s your buddy John!”

Caught in the wonder of the moment, John unthinkingly drops his hand onto Mary’s. She looks up into his eyes. Where else? Thus begins a second moment of wordless wonder: the beginnings of love. How did it happen? Their two human hearts, shaken loose by the space dance of two robots in love, have been revived by a shared reenactment of moviegoing.

But two humans are just the beginning. When the thousands (millions?) of Axiom passengers return to Earth, and the captain shares with them his new enthusiasm for farming, we are reminded of the glories of communality. For those of us who don’t live our whole lives in space, and are never brought down to Earth to discover the miracle of vegetation, we have movies. Every great one gives us life.

Which means that the solar-powered WALL•E was right about the scavenged hubcap all along. When he made it into a hat from Hello, Dolly!, it was the sun.