No Disassemble Wall-E Five!

Like those plucky and industrious Japanese, the Faustian animators at Pixar have assimilated another pop culture icon into their unstoppable juggernaut of cinematic domination, and no one seems to care. This time, friends, in spite of Wall-E's evident status as the CGI Messiah (seriously, you should read some of the effusive worship-schlock spilling out of the collective mouth of our nation's "critics"), I shan't be put off the scent so easily.

I adored . . . no, ADORED the original Short Circuit movies. I memorized them and recited them in their resplendant entirety to family and friends. Along with Tim Burton's Batman and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, the Short Circuit films supplied almost all of my conversational raw materials between the years 1985 and 1990. And I guess I'm really rather tired of Pixar's undefeated record at the box office. Is it just me, or do any of you feel even the slightest twinge of suspicion about any studio that seems incapable of producing a bad film? I mean, no artist hits the creative bullseye every time. Not even the Omnipotent Beatles were exempt from the occasional flop (QED the lackluster "You Can't Do That" and the totally indulgent "Wild Honey Pie"). And to tell the honest truth, I like the Beatles (and others) all the more for stinking up the scene once or twice during the course of their illustrious career. Sure, some would offer up A Bug's Life as Pixar's less-than-stellar follow up to the Earth-shattering genius that was Toy Story, but even Pixar's cast-off garnered a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Part of me genuinely hopes that I will find Wall-E repugnant and lame when I inevitably venture forth to see it this weekend. But the other part of me, the part that Pixar owns, clamors for more computer-animated goodness like a heroin addict with the DTs. To paraphrase the most recent installment from our good friends over at Futurama, "Love the Pixar."

Oh, and less than two weeks on the countdown and all that rot, what what.