WALL?E" is brilliant, amazing, astonishing, a work of great humor and heart.

And then it loses something.

Fortunately, the problem is not fatal. But neither is it minor; for a substantial chunk of time, the story becomes almost . . . dull.

Still, we have come to praise "WALL?E," not to pan it. And for sheer innovation alone, the film stands above the fray.

The wizards at Pixar have broken new ground with this picture. Their animation technique is now so advanced, so slick and seamless, that the visuals look utterly real. In their equally visionary "Cars," there was one scene in which we forgot we were watching animation; in "WALL?E," we forget it for perhaps half the movie.

We only remember because the story is about the sort of things that can best be rendered via animation: robots, space travel and a post-apocalyptic future.

Our hero is a plucky little robot named WALL?E, who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to No. 5, the plucky little robot in "Short Circuit." WALL?E (that's short for Waste Allocation Land Lifter Earth-Class, but you have to be awfully fast to catch it) is alone on Earth, the last of his model. All humans have fled to outer space to escape their own pollution.

With nothing but a pet cockroach for a friend, WALL?E diligently collects mountains of trash, compacts it and stacks it in skyscraperlike towers to the sky. In his brief spare time, he watches an old video of "Hello, Dolly" and dreams of what it would be like to be in love.

Enter a robot of unknown origin, an egg-shaped cutie whose unsubtle name, we later learn, is Eve. Their meeting is cute, as Eve tries to blast him and pretty much anything else that moves. But soon he is making goggle eyes at her, she is blinking her LEDs at him and Louis Armstrong is singing "La Vie en Rose."

It's sweet, funny and altogether glorious, and it remains spectacular when the story blasts off into outer space. There we are, treated to pointed social commentary about our consumerist society and the way it feeds into laziness and obesity -- ideas that are likely to zoom over the heads of younger viewers who are there to see the cute robot.

And although it is initially interesting, this commentary is actually the beginning of what goes wrong. As it becomes more and more heavy-handed, it succeeds only in pushing the viewer away from the film. And all the action scenes and spectacle fail to draw us back in.

It's also not a good idea to make specific references to "2001: A Space Odyssey," which serves to take us away from the world so painstakingly created and remind us forcefully that we are watching a movie. It breaks the magic.

Still, there is an awful lot to love about this movie. The character WALL?E is a creation of anthropomorphic genius, capable of expressing more human emotion than, say, Hayden Christensen. The animation is jaw-droppingly brilliant, and the details, almost without fail, are exactly right.

It is so good, we want the film to be perfect. It raises its own bar so high that when it fails to be perfect, we are a little disappointed.