WALL-E is Pixar near its best. This may not be as perfectly structured as the original Toy Story nor as manically inventive as Monsters, Inc., but it is a wise and beautiful commentary on how technology can steal the world away from us. Thrown from their robo hover chairs, the posthumans look around in amazement. "I didn't know we had a pool!" Slowly they crawl to awareness, recognising that they must cultivate their garden in the real world, not listen to the robot sycophants. Pixar's insight is both consoling and challenging: humanity will never be redundant; nothing else can build a civilised world.

Some commentators have protested that, considered as an eco-parable or political satire, WALL-E is only cheap and trite. But these elements are superficial and decorative. The meat of the story, as the director has stressed in interview, is not a call for a better recycling policy or a blast at Bush but a terrible warning of the wilderness we make of a city and a civilisation when we no longer connect with reality or with one another.

It is a stroke of ironic genius by Pixar to have placed a human soul inside that most soulless of objects, the robot. The ghosts dancing in Pixar's computers become a celebration of the wisdom that empty flattery is not enough. Two misfits and a cockroach on a heap of rubble give more hope for the future than a sleek spacecraft if the former have love and the latter only has robots. All our technological achievements are hollow if they are not animated by love.