Dirty Harry reviews Pixar's Wall-E and is knocked out by the incredible CGI (as was I when I saw the trailer before the latest Indiana Jones movie), but he's rather offput by one of its themes:

For all its charms and wonders, one moment sticks in my head and, well, craw. It also confuses me. Why? Why go there? Other than the dark chuckles from the liberal critics around me, what’s to gain? And other than a lack of self-control or hubris on the filmmakers’ part, there’s no explaining it. But they did it. They actually had the President (Fred Willard) say about his failed mission, “Stay the course.”

Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense. Quite a disappointment.

On the other hand, its not the first Pixar movie that some in the starboard side of the Blogosphere thought a bit squishy. But then there's this:

At first there’s not much of an environmental message. The piles of garbage covering our planet come off as nothing more than a good idea to set up a cool alt-version of our world and the lead character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last. The humans are introduced as meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum.

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

Meanwhile, one of Harry's commenters asks:

Have they started with the anti-consumerism merchandising and advertising tie-ins yet?

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Steven Den Beste emails, "If you look at the credits, the problem becomes clear: Brad Bird didn't direct this one. He wasn't involved in it at all." It will certainly be interesting to see how handles this upcoming film, given its all-too-recent subtext.