WALL-E, a gentle children’s sci-fi movie from Disney and Pixar, starts out on a future Earth that has been abandoned by humans because it has been covered with garbage. The hero, a robot whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, spends his days picking up the trash, crushing it into cubes with his built-in trash compactor, and stacking the cubes into gigantic pyramids.

He has been at this for 700 years. His fellow robots have all broken down. His only companion is a pet cockroach which he feeds with 700-year-old Twinkies (still good as new.)

One day a spaceship lands and disgorges a beautiful, shiny flying robot named EVE. WALL-E is instantly infatuated. EVE turns out to be sort of a robot tsundere, but he eventually wins her over. (Awww…Robot love!)

However EVE is summoned back to her home base, and WALL-E stows away to follow her–back to a starship where the tubby descendants of humanity float around on levitating chairs, waited on hand and foot by compliant robots.

First the good news: this movie looks really good. If you want to make a movie in which the most sympathetic characters are two robots and a cockroach, 3-D computer-generated animation is clearly the way to go.

Less good news: it’s not as funny as I had hoped. I was hoping for something hilarious. Instead I got something mildly amusing. Nor is it particularly exciting. The kindest thing I can say is that it won’t cause the kids any nightmares.

It’s very cute and slick-looking, but the script is standard B-movie sci-fi. Think of the original Star Wars movie. (You’ll have to imagine it without any villains, and with two R2D2s, and imagine that the R2D2s get almost all of the screen time.)

It’s not a waste of time, but I was hoping for a bit more from it.