it felt like a celluloid hug

Amanda and I just got back from watching Wall-E. I can't recommend it highly enough. Besides being simply a beautifully touching movie, it's so great to see Pixar continue to show the entire rest of the world how to make an animated film.

There's a reason they're the best. They focus on heart without taking the easy way out and descending into fart jokes. They focus on timeless stories without getting tied down to predictable plot lines. They continue to push themselves in every sense - whether artistically, technologically, or the gray area between where they seem so at home - each time they make a movie, never for once seeming to take their audience for granted. They seem to understand that making a movie is an art form, not a marketing-driven cash cow, and that art is meaningless unless you can connect with the audience and make them feel something.

And that's where their strength lies. I have the same feeling watching a Pixar film as I did when I was little watching the worlds of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Jim Henson. It's this deep, warm feeling of benevolent, kind, intelligence - this safe sense that someone who has been to the boundaries of the unknown is telling me that the world is vast, life is worth living, and that the human imagination is the greatest treasure ever in the history of history.

Kind of a lot to get out of a 2 hour G-rated movie. But that's their genius. Check it out when you can.