Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D début, is Grand Central Station in the age of L.A.X. Take this for an opening shot: Starting amid the snowflakes, above the 24-karat twinkle of the City of Lights, Robert Richardson’s camera bears down on a train-station platform, perks up like a groundstroke, and glides parallel to the rush-hour hustle like a hawk piercing the locomotive steam. It’s a bravura use of technology: The extra depth lends a heightened tension to the people and luggage so narrowly averted; and yet the motion is deifically smooth: Like a 3-D-simulator ride at Universal Studios—or riding shotgun on God’s road test. I prefer the latter because the shot pairs grandiosity, and mammoth cinephilic self-consciousness, with a thwack of surprise. We’re aware of the trick, but still fall for it: as if in the sway of an illusionist who’s eroding our skepticism. Considering that this is a movie about magic, it makes sense that, after this first wave of his wand, the flashy Scorsese we all know and love virtually disappears.

For a film of its scale, Hugo is remarkably small in scope. And despite being a movie about thaumaturgy, there’s nothing in it that can be classified as fantasy: Orks and aliens need not apply. The idea of an orphan squatting at a Victorian-gothic railroad station in 1931—an invisible waif among inattentive masses at a gilded gateway to the world—matches these ironies like P.B. with J. Having lost his clocksmith father (Jude Law) to a fire, the title character (Asa Butterfield, with eyes blue enough to blind Yves Klein and a name that conjures images of Oz under a dusting of Land O’Lakes) became the ward of a krunky uncle who looks, and probably smells, like the carny who hocked the Elephant Man. When the uncle, in turn, clocks out, he bequeaths to Hugo a responsibility more consequential than the boy knows: to keep the clocks ticking at a Parisian gare—the rafters of which he calls home—like a renegade intern without college cred to recoup. If Hugo can dodge the station’s Dickensian inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) artfully enough, he noshes on unguarded croissants, lifts tchotchkes and curios from the shop kept by mysterious Georges (Ben Kingsley)—he of the gloomy demeanor and bristly white chin—and tinkers with an equally enigmatic automaton that his dad didn’t live to fix. Georges gives Hugo a shoulder cold enough to melt Frosty, but his god-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz)—wearing a beret in 1931 but maybe Wayfarers in 2011—has a book-bred thirst for adventure too sharp to typify nerdiness. And Hugo’s totally crushing on her!

Especially as a family film, but even compared to a spectacular movie in roughly its same class—such as The Fall—Hugo is a remarkably complex work: Form, content, and theme are more tightly stitched together than a pair of designer jeans. It’s almost a living organism. But unlike most “self-aware” pomo schmorgasboards, it seems refreshingly unaware of its self-awareness, and even this seems thematically driven. In order to explain, I’ll have to raise the spoiler-alert flag—but since you’d have to be both a.) a complete film-history geek and b.) living deep underwater, sleeping with the fishes, for it to matter, I’ll fly the flag at half-mast. Georges is short for—wait for it—Georges Méliès, the magician and film pioneer behind the iconic A Trip to the Moon (1902). Embittered by the post-World War I disaffection with whimsy and what was yet to be branded “surreal,” he’s all but scrubbed away the accomplishments of his past. (For the record, I found this reveal to be weak tea when I expected a taurine jolt—not because it’s slightly ahistorical, but because, despite a cornucopia of evidence to the contrary, it makes Méliès seem like a selfish, small-minded jerk.) He’s unaware that his work is pored over by scholars like Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg, that fun cheekbone contortionist whose Grampa Munster mug on Boardwalk Empire recalls the Emil Jannings posters strewn about the movie palace here)—having faked his own death, he’s unaware that any of his work still exists. The only non-cellulose nitrate relic from the old days is the automaton, which turns out to be a literal key to the plot, the linchpin to a Méliès revival. (It’s also a masterstroke of production design, somewhere between the cool-countenanced King Tut’s sarcophagus and the mad scientist’s humanoid appliances in Edward Scissorhands.) I’m with David Edelstein in thinking that Scorsese’s film-restoration plea, set to Satie and Saint-Saëns, takes one out of the movie a bit—it’s a little Jehovah’s Witnessy. But that’s like caviling the birthday card a third-grader slips to the teacher who first sparks his sex drive.

If one looks too closely at its posthuman conflation of men and machines, the movie becomes a little creepy. For instance, Hugo dreams that he lifts up his shirt and finds the automaton’s iron ribcage where his chest should be. It’s a cyberpunk vision of puberty: a correlative to Méliès’s insistence that films are an iteration of dreams. (The urchin has another nightmare in which he’s nearly creamed by an oncoming train, and that one almost comes true—it’s based on a wreck that happened in real life—implying some kind of sixth sense on Hugo’s part or black magic on Méliès’s.) At the end, the cast is united in clinking cocktails at a party. But the camera tracks its way into the adjacent room, empty save for the automaton, which—yet another illusion—looks to have molded its mien to something like proprietary pride. And then there’s the full title of the Brian Selznick book on which John Logan’s delicate script is based: The Invention of Hugo Cabret—a sort of high-meta double entendre. However, taken as a metaphor for life—and, by extension, le cinéma—the notion that everybody has a function, like parts in a machine (i.e., a clock or camera), and Hugo’s function is to fix things (i.e., like a craftsman or artist—or filmmaker, who is both), is satisfying on a simple, atavistic level: akin to the clown’s even-this-pebble-has-a-purpose pep talk in Fellini’s La Strada (1954). Some of the imagery in Hugo—and this is a stretch—might be alluding to Welles’s The Stranger (1946). Since Welles, a noted magician, directed that thriller to show the studios that he could sell out with the best of ’em, his clocktower stood for style for its own sake. For Scorsese, as for the concourse clock at Grand Central, style has a function. Style is magic: It’s what makes a movie in which everything that happens could happen in real life feel like a fantasy epic. He’s pulled a $170 million dime out from behind our ears.

As a showman, with style to burn, Scorsese’s always been one of Welles’s aptest pupils; and he indeed includes some woozily Wellesian high-angle compositions that really pop in 3-D. But, aside from the opening and closing shots—and at least thrice, during Thelma Schoonmaker’s blood-pressure-boosting montages, when I reached, in vain, for a rewind button, to dissect them—the director vanishes into the mise-en-scène (for lack of a better word; honestly) like an old-timey studio-system ghost. That doesn’t mean his work isn’t splendid. Not just technically, but also with the cast: One upswing of Moretz’s eyebrow is worth a million frames of your average child prodigy; and Baron Cohen is a one-man Vaudeville duo. Happily, for a film with sequences that took nearly three months to digitally render, each coffee ring—from day one to day 89—shines forth, each tannin aglow. It’s easy to see why James Cameron talks up the 3-D in Hugo as if he were spinning a glowing Gizmodo editorial in his head: Scorsese doesn’t simulate real life, he enhances it. The depth of focus, especially in the exteriors, isn’t always tactile, in a naturalistic sense; it’s like a pop-up book: a marvelous yuletide fairy tale in Autochrome indigo and gold.

Hugo is, in sum, an authentic celebration of artifice. There’s something fully-trimmed-tree beautiful about it—transporting, even, since it manages to do this with the sort of generosity that a Quentin Tarantino would’ve hoarded for himself—and something that feels like a cold draft intruding on the Kahlua-and-hot cocoa toastiness that accompanied my egress from the theater. This auteur has successfully made the supreme Lionel toy-train set—with lots of money, and language suitable for children. But Scorsese’s message is not merely that life needs art; it’s that life and art cannot be disentangled. That fiction and reality, in this context, are inseparable. (“Happy endings only happen in movies,” Méliès, in one scene, avers; and then his life, in a movie, ends happily.) Usually, as in Synecdoche, New York, this is writ large. But Scorsese’s caméra stylo writes in invisible ink. It’s a kind of stylistic voodoo: a magic trick. Maybe I’m overreaching; maybe it’s a vibe that naturally results from a gaga hyper-proficiency that can itself only result from what I blushingly call love. Maybe Hugo carries the same message that Scorsese’s style conveys in all of his work, even when it’s expressed for different ends. Fantasy needs be nothing more than reality imaginatively experienced. Grand Central Station could be the end of the line.

Pace the Occupy Sesame Street camp, I think the movie’s flaws have less to do with depriving children of their oil-soaked brainwash than depriving adults of some of their favorite celebrity sock-puppets. (For the record, the principals never state their position on fossil-fuel consumption; Kermit knows how hard it is to be green. And don’t the filmmakers get credit for making Gonzo a job-creator: a toilet tycoon? If you’re blue, it’s easy to make the green.) Gonzo, Fozzie, Rowlf, and the others get relatively short shrift—even if it’s justified, more or less, by a very Muppety montage: a little bout of self-awareness in which the characters order the film editor around. Which gets to my overarching point that, even if Segel and Nicholas Stoller’s screenwritten portrait of their childhood idols is crooked, it’s crooked at the right, sweet-but-silly angle. So there’s little use in getting too worked up about how some of the musical numbers—the director, James Bobin, has previously plied his trade on Flight of the Concords—seem a pinch half-assed, with fine songs like Adams’s “Party of One” (when she’s doing a little Kristen Wiigling at Mel’s Diner) and Cooper’s gangsta rap ending a bit too early. Or how Segel, a rubber monument to schlubbiness, has a smile that looks forced, even if it isn’t, and like it’s always struggling to conceal despair. I’ll even forgive the ad hoc framing story, about blandly uncompelling Walter, because its purpose—introducing the younger generation to the troupe their parents have brought them to see—is evident, if less essential than feared.

It’s my impression that these weaknesses indicate that The Muppets was explicitly not conceived in terms of focus-grouped Disney shapeliness, and that the sentimentality—nostalgia is sentimentality—is at least of the genuine sort. Just as the sentimentality embedded in the question that both the movie and the media have asked—are the Muppets still relevant?—is also genuine. It answers itself and begs for a “yes.” I don’t remember half as much fuss over the Smurfs being cinematized last summer, or the Chipmunks and their ear-piercing squeakquels. Relevance is not a germane factor in attaining precious P&A. But the Muppets hold a special place in the hearts of people in the same age bracket as those who wrote this movie and its attendant barrage of think-pieces, and who enlisted in its army of cameos. (Except for a dim walk-on by Selena Gomez, the guest stars are 30 and up.) Although he donned their duds, Henson wasn’t a hippie; but he was very invested in the generation gap that grew in the 1960s. The Muppets came to represent a compromise between the variety-show values of yore and a counterculture that strove to break down formal and artistic conventions as part of its purgative program. The Muppet Show didn’t just pioneer this formula, it fed it to the young—to children who went on to make The Simpsons and the Pixar movies and Modern Family. Its impudence can be blamed for making legions of kids think they’re cleverer than they are, but it was a gateway drug to a type of comedy that’s now pervasive: virtually the only style that brings the critical class and the hoi polloi (if the two can still be distinguished) together. The experiment was a success. And I can objectively prove that the filmmakers’ intentions were sincere because, in the segment in which Gonzo’s poultry-fetish girls sing a cover of Cee Lo Green, they resist the refrain “Cluck you.”

But Pixar pastiches are too richly imaginative to feel like hand-me-downs; they don’t make allusions, they draw together familiar threads and stitch them into a unified whole. What separates Toy Story from The Velveteen Rabbit or Where the Wild Things Are or A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh—though not The Brave Little Toaster, a childhood favorite of mine borrowed from liberally here—is its inclusion of consumer culture. In earlier eras, sentient dolls weren’t threatened with the garbage pail; they had the insurance policy of being passed on to the next generation. At a time when there’s a new hot item every Christmas, these figurines have to stay in shape if they want to stay in the crate; the conflict between cowpoke and spaceman in the first Toy Story was not instigated insignificantly. Though the toys’ acceptance of their new phase of “life” is cheerful in part three—and, for a blockbusting cartoon, courageous—there are strands of feeling that seem almost heartbreakingly mature. When, as they inch perilously closer to the hellish maw of a fire-breathing incinerator, the toys link hands and form a chain, it’s an eerily moving moment—the acceptance of moving on in Up has advanced to an acceptance of moving beyond. No plastic circle has ever left our mortal coil so gracefully unfurled.

The screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, cobbled together Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but the hybrid hasn’t been plotted out; it’s a pastiche. One may not be sure why Alice is afraid to face a dragon that she thinks is imaginary, or whether the Red Queen’s vizier (Crispin Glover) recognizes Wonderland’s Most Wanted. (When he corners Alice in the corridor is he on to her or coming on to her?) Carroll didn’t let narrative get in the way of his paradoxes, which he structured like algorithms or derivatives—flawlessly meaningless. In this new Alice in Wonderland, paradoxes push the narrative forward. It moves full-steam ahead without having anywhere to go, even when a scene is worth loitering over. Burton maintains the suspense only sparingly—as when Alice sneaks about the cage of a toothy mongrel, prompting the gooiest cinematic lick since Gozu. But, on the whole, this movie would’ve flunked calculus—and its driving test, too.

In some ways, however, this adaptation is Wicked: The Mad Hatter has become Dorothy’s dimwitted Scarecrow. Even beneath a Lady Gaga pancake—and Mountain Dew-daubed irises the size of manholes—Depp grimaces better than anyone else in Hollywood. He gives the picture a much-needed emotional core. No longer burnished into terseness, as he was in Public Enemies, Depp is back in weirdo mode. He playfully backhands the Carroll-tinged dialogue, but his Hatter is a sad clown rather than a mad one—and Depp’s Chaplinesque proficiency makes Alice’s disregard all the more painful. Even in the original book, she wasn’t a particularly endearing character; she was the arbiter of the Age of Reason. But you can’t make her foil lovable if you don’t provide someone to love him. Dorothy’s teary departure from Oz might be a little mawkish for modern tastes, but when Alice says farewell to her friends, she may as well be flipping them the bird. In a coda as implausible as anything in Wonderland, she promptly rejects her beau, tells off the aristocracy, and woos her would-be father-in-law into making her a venture capitalist. She has all the P.R. charm of a Martha Stewart when she announces her intent to open trade routes to China. What will she trade? Let me guess—opium? Despite the ominous, oblong production design, a skirmish between Reds and Whites worthy of Tolkien and Eisenstein, and some snappy surrealist repartee, I was through with this looking-glass long before the brat set sail. If she only had a heart…

Recently, Burton’s imagination has fizzled when applied to the intellectual properties of others—even though Sleepy Hollow is a Halloween treat, and Batman Returns one of my franchise-film favorites. His Sweeney Todd was messy, too, and when Depp moonwalks in Alice, I flashed back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—a bad trip. Maybe, to me, a superheated mess like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is preferable because it was an iteration of the filmmaker’s mind; the squiggly story-line seemed to mean something to Terry Gilliam, even if the audience felt it was on the wrong side of his imaginarium. Where the Wild Things Are was a little sleepy—if not hollow; Spike Jonze clearly loved the material. His vernal warmth would’ve melted this icicle Alice. But Burton’s large-scale, Disney-financed perennial seems chilled by frantic labor and compromise. The mash-up will probably leave children feeling blue. It’s not the world-soul melancholy that the (somewhat creepily) death-aware Coraline left one with; Alice will merely jumble kids’ sympathies. Burton directs the way the White Queen (a surprisingly spunky—and surprisingly platinum—Anne Hathaway) concocts a magic elixir: with a pinch of underhanded wit, but as jittery as if there was a gun pointed at her head.

But, allow me to dismount my high horse of metaphorical grandiosity, and explain how my sermon relates to Where the Wild Things Are. Before lapsing into my own belletrism, I was prepared to quote the French film critic André Bazin, who said that “To explain [Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio] De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love … [T]he affection De Sica feels for his creatures is no threat to them … There is no admixture of pity in it … because pity does violence to the dignity of the man who is its object”—because I think the same could be said of director Spike Jonze’s treatment of the characters in Wild Things. But one should also consult American critic James Agee, who, three months after publishing a florid rave of De Sica’s Shoeshine (1947), retracted his evaluation. He ascribed his enthusiasm to the fact that the movie was “made from the heart, and so touched the heart”; its intimacy had allowed him to overlook what he later perceived as flaws.

I’m leery of overloading Wild Things, because it’s a film for which the anticipation has become wilder than the final cut. At best, the movie will become a beloved black sheep among kids’ classics. By his own admission, the director “didn’t set out to make a children’s film … [but] to represent, as honestly as possible, what it feels like to be a person trying to understand the world when you’re that age”; yet what he’s come up with isn’t really a children’s film, or a children’s movie for adults, or an adult movie for children. A wave of controversy has splashed against the protean nature of Wild Things—its lack of conventional narrative, plot goals, and even rainbow-bright sheen has kept financiers on edge. You almost feel you’re on the side of corrupt, literal-minded, dishonest, pedantic adulthood if sugar, spice and everything nice don’t gestate in your heart while the tale unfolds onscreen. (Some have argued that the filmmakers’ playful abstention from structure is like the work of John Cassavetes. What kid doesn’t clamor to see A Woman Under the Influence?) If you don’t react to the movie, you fear you’ve become an apostate poo-pooer on the concept of the inviolable artist—even if these particular artists cost their studio-patron something in the vicinity of $100 million. Well, I may be corrupt, but I’m hardly an adult; I feel affectionate toward Wild Things, but this is a movie to hug, not to make love to.

Of course not, you say; that’s cinematic pedophilia! Sure, sure—but I still think Wild Things falls short of greatness, and not because it’s a “children’s film.” Wonder and confusion and melancholy are indeed elements of youth, but so are excitement and silliness and an absence of limitations. Jonze’s venerated ability to merge “the realistic and the banal … with the fantastic and the extreme” is a touch too close to banal here; his deadpan was key in his Charlie Kaufman collaborations (in his other two features, he rejoiced in Being John Malkovich and the throes of Adaptation), but Wild Things is too understated. The movie failed to excite my senses; it lacked the tonic qualities of art which made Jonze’s other films so fun, and a select few kiddie pics scintillating. The Fall—directed by Tarsem, another music-video maker—was also made with love and empathy, and even a dollop of sentimentality; but Tarsem let the wild things loose, and embraced the sort of indulgences that captivated us as kids, and still captivate us as “adults.” This summer’s Ponyo was as squishily innocent as Wild Things, yet it had pep and spunk bursting from its gills; you felt its goofballs come at you like curve balls. Wild Things is heartfelt but tentative. The scriptwriters (Jonze co-wrote the film with novelist Dave Eggers) seem to have reverted too far into childhood; emotionally, the movie is about as outgoing as a reserved little tyke of the glasses-braces-pimples variety—charming, but turbid, too.

The plot isn’t much more expansive than Maurice Sendak’s iconic picture book, a bedtime perennial since 1963—when it was deemed shockingly outré for having its hero sentenced to bed without supper. It’s not so shocking anymore; in the movie, Mother is single, and played appositely by Catherine Keener in her characteristic befuddled-sweetheart manner. And this time Max is a runaway—a bratty loner who’s blind to the suffering of his burdened mother and peer-pressurized teen sister (Pepita Emmerichs). He leaps over the Twilight Zone and onto the isle of the wild things, which, like the movie, are less wild than mild; the whole colony is in need of group therapy. One gathers, though, that these mammoth woolies are all in Max’s head: an embodied moral lesson, charmingly disguised by Jonze and Eggers. Max inveigles the neurotics into crowning him their king, but as every politician realizes, you can’t please everybody; staving off sorrow is the first campaign promise he breaks. Max must learn to be empathic, to be a parent, to grow up. This is where Jonze’s De Sica reflex kicks in, and in which, the movie delivers its humble largesse: Max’s rich imagination doesn’t place him on a pedestal. The filmmakers are like loving parents who don’t want to spoil their boy because they want to see him grow up right. Their Wizard of Oz is dry-eyed, their yellow-brick road a shade more ocher. When the wild things discover that Max is no less flawed than they are, they discern he’s merely “normal”—like them. He just can’t wait to be king, but Jonze and Eggers and Sendak have a vision that’s the opposite of autocratic.

Their storyline can be read in two ways. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the little señorita escapes her cruel existence by dreaming her troubles away; in the end, her dreamworld is all she’s got, but at least it’s an alternative. For Max, the Freudian id-land is hardly an alternative—it’s an allegory. For this reason, at least one critic read defeatism into Wild Things. Depending on your bent, I suppose, the film’s outlook is either realistic or depressive. But I think it’s less a question of one camp being right, and more a manifestation of the filmmakers’ own confusion. “It’s a movie that takes kids seriously,” says Jonze to Creative Screenwriting; but must kids be taken so solemnly? Max is like a dull doppelgänger of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. The comic-strip kid had an imagination fed on monsters, as well as superheroes, space aliens, and detective stories. And then there was that zinger, the Choose-Your-Adventure philosophical underpinnings that placed the cartoon in that playful, liminal netherworld between physical youth and intellectual maturity. Max’s imagination is fueled more by psychology than philosophy. That’s one of many mature fruits that the filmmakers didn’t squeeze. But I wish they had: They could use the juice.

What they do have, however, is commendable. The young actor who plays Max has a name better suited for a rapper’s music company than a child star, but he has the flush cheeks of a frustrated monarch, and a matching pair of eyes that mutter the curses his mouth is too shy to emit. As the wild things, James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano, Lauren Ambrose, and Chris Cooper give their Muppets sensibilities as distinctive as Kermit’s and Miss Piggy’s. Lance Acord, Jonze’s long-time cinematographer, has helped to give the movie a consistent style that’s crisp like a fall afternoon; the handsome, stark clarity of the images allies beautifully to Jonze’s tough-love generosity. The soundtrack, however, by Karen O (the Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeah!), is a little too sylvan at times: like Yoko Ono frolicking through a glade. But the wild things themselves are a sartorial feat—giant, mottled, bowlegged beasts with costumed trunks and convincingly animated faces. Compared to these chimeric mutts, Max is the size of a teddy bear. The effect is dreamlike: Children would love it if their stuffed animals could hug them back; these velveteen rabbits can even hold them.

What bothers me most cannot be attributed to the movie itself, but rather to how it is framed; its publicity has the odiferous air of Peter Panhandling. In a recent New York Times Magazine feature, Saki Knafo adopts a mawkish posture that the movie has the dignity not to take. He observes that: “Although [Jonze] has no children of his own, his feeling for what it’s like to be a child seems to be stronger and more immediate than that of most people his age, and children are often drawn to him.” That may be true, but must Knafo infantilize Jonze’s artistry by reducing it to “attitude”? “An implicit question,” Knafo claims, “precedes [Jonze’s] artistic choices: Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?” It’s as if the Quentin Tarantino analysis got misplaced in the Jonze file. That query may apply to the director’s music videos, but it is the opposite of an artistic choice when it comes to features. Music videos are great testbeds for technique and can be very fun to watch; they are short enough that to get by on hip glamour and mood-induction alone. But, in regard to mainstream pop music, at least, they aren’t to features what short stories and poems are to novels; a better analogy would be commercials to T.V. shows.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?” probably lurks in the back of Jonze’s mind, as it does in any good experimenter’s. But I doubt it takes precedence over other concerns. “I always like the idea that the characters are making the movie you’re watching,” says the director. “I try to be more invisible.” That’s closer to the De Sica spirit of Wild Things, and the ebullience of Malkovich and Adaptation. So why this callow “cool” talk? It relates less to the movie than it does to the movie’s ad campaign. According to Fast Company, “the film has become something of a watershed for marketing to the tight-jeans, nerd-glasses set. Witness the current ads running for the film, which [feature] gauzy cinematography and a track by Arcade Fire.” Aha! When the trailer ran in theaters—with cutesy, hand-drawn titles proclaiming the holy matrimony of Jonze, Eggers, Sendak, and O—you could almost hear those nerd glasses slide down the trendsetters’ noses, nearly to the point of falling down their plaid shirts and on to their recently wetted laps. They probably Tweeted themselves in the middle of the theater. I don’t think Knafo is a shill for Warner Bros., but all this shallow talk of coolness must’ve given the studio execs their own wet dreams—even if the discourse is condescending to the filmmakers, and ravages the film’s best virtue: its unsentimental innocence.

Of course, when you get in the range of $100 million, you’ve got to stay afloat somehow—and I do hope the picture does. I can even excuse the fatuous claim that the movie is “based on one of the most beloved books of all time.” (It’s nestled between The Bhagavad Gita and The Fountainhead.) But the movie never goes soft on Max; it tells him flat-out that he can’t remain on a dreamy island unto himself forever—he has to grow up. And yet here come the marketers, selling toys to grown-ups—“sophisticated,” “trendy” “adults.” Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, though made with conviction, was a blue-light special for hipsters, too—but at least it was about the shoppers’ coevals, and didn’t accessorize. Unless bohos aspire to end up like hobos, I hope they know better than to splurge on fanged jewelery and coats made from the fur of imaginary beasts, even if it is on sale at Urban Outfitters. (It’s an apter venue than Wal-Mart, which is my generation’s never-never land for other reasons…) These merchandising tactics are like a Taking Woodstock nostalgia trip for the sentimental young. Peter Panhandling, allow me to introduce Peter Pandering.

The title refers to this fairy tale’s spunky princess: a froglike Little Mermaid who washes ashore on the beach-front property of five-year-old Sosuke—voiced by Frankie Jonas. (Yes, Jonas. Disney co-produced and distributed the film, but voice-over casting is the only spot the white glove seems to have touched.) Sosuke looks after and loves his pet whatever-she-is; Ponyo loves him, too, and to his surprise, tells him so. The catch is that her father, Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), does not condone of human boyfriends. In fact, it’s Fujimoto’s job to usher in a new geochronological epoch that’ll put an end to our rotten race. He eventually gets his daughter back, but Ponyo (Noah Lindsey Cyrus—another dash of Disney) uses magic inherited from her effulgent-nymph mother (Cate Blanchett) to sprout legs, metamorphose into a little girl, and return to her beloved.

After their reunion, though, the plot balances on a wobbly fulcrum―a seesaw that has to be balanced out by the purity and verity of Sosuke’s love. In narrative terms, Ponyo devolves into a picaresque. Miyazaki’s vision is so gentle that the dramatic tension goes kerplunk; even the forces of nature are on the lovers’ side. But though it’s flabby, fat floats. The movie has a chill driftwood rhythm, and its equability prevents the fairy tale from getting schmaltzy. Even offbeat Hollywood fairy tales (like Up) are wont to meander down familiar, if agreeable, streams; the plot mechanics are so minimal in Ponyo that it appears to have been made by hospitable stoners for whom a whirling a zoetrope is as exciting as impending armageddon.

Not that Miyazaki and his associates are lazy, or have any illegal habits that I could attest to, but their movie plays like Jim Jarmusch in Wonderland―filigreed deadpan innocent of its own inertia. It’s Western mythology infused with Eastern serenity. Adults with Western tastes may become impatient; not all magic realism is tolerable to me, either. I found the book Pinocchio tedious because the author seemed to distribute voice boxes to animals only if his doing so was convenient to the plot. Its statically naughty marionette palled on me, too. Ponyo and Sosuke may be statically nice, but seem independent of any preordained, didactic plot; following their exploits is as relaxing as a float down a lazy river.

The drawback of all this is that Ponyo probably won’t impact one’s emotional memory to the extent that certain sequences from The Fall or Close Encounters of the Third Kind―or more sprawling Miyzaki cartoons like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Nausicaä―do. Even the animation in Ponyo is surprisingly modest: accomplished, but old-fashioned in a way that’s both refreshing and a touch banal. Yet there are wonderful strokes like Ponyo surfing on waves that are half-water and half-fish; or batty old matrons (played by such idiosyncratic luminaries as Betty White, Lily Tomlin, and Cloris Leachman) who resemble Hokusai sketches; or Sosuke’s alpha-male, beer-guzzling, volatile mother (Tina Fey!), who might be the worst movie driver since Annie Hall; or Fujimoto the foppish fashionista, who may hold Poseidon’s job, but dresses somewhere between Captain Nemo, Nosferatu and a steam-punk David Bowie. (His glam-rocker makeup must be waterproof; no matter how much seawater hits it, it never so much as smudges.)

Ponyo compensates for its listlessness with an atmosphere of affable absurdity. It doesn’t work up adults with winks and nudges of dick-joke Shrek-ery; it seems a kiddie movie by default because that’s the language Miyazaki is demonstrably fluent in. In his blending of real and surreal, he seems to be surfing a Haruki Murakami wavelength, but the weird doesn’t feel so sophisticatedly, consciously weird as it does in Murakami―who writes for grown-ups. Sosuke’s town turns Atlantis and its citizens drift about in rowboats with smiles as broad as oars. When Sosuke’s mother realizes that her son’s girlfriend is an incarnation of his erstwhile goldfish, she invites her in for tea; when Sosuke asks her if she thinks that Ponyo came from far away, his mother says, “Yeah.”

Although Miyazaki is revered by some as a great master in the same way that Tim Burton is, I fear saying too much and bloating Ponyo―it has a special charm, but its tricks are for kids. I’d be doing the film as much a service as a disservice by drowning it in accolades and exaggerating its depth. But it might be a tribute to the movie’s spirit that a shaggy-haired patron seated in front of me took tokes from his peace-pipe while it played, and not a single protest was lodged by an audience full of tots and their ’rents.

What’s Up? Well, it begins with a newsreel about explorer/adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer); he’s the hero of an introverted young fan named Carl (Edward Asner) and his girlfriend Ellie (Elie Docter), but his obsession with finding an extinct bird in Paradise Falls, South America, has left him discredited. Carl and Ellie grow up and get married—sixty-odd years pass via a quickie montage—and they save up to venture to Paradise Falls, but never make it. They can’t have children, and advance to old age together, but Ellie dies, leaving Carl an embittered oldster, unwilling to let go of her memory, or even their house (which has become an obstruction to a construction site).

In a fit, Carl canes a man who tampers with the mailbox that he and Ellie installed years before, and is resigned to a retirement home; but he has another trick up his sleeve: He inflates hundreds of balloons from his chimney, and flies the house toward South America. He did not, however, account for a stowaway: a chinless Asian blimp-boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who needs to assist a senior to attain his final merit badge. When they finally reach the continent, Carl wants to give Russell change for the bus ride home (that’ll require a lot of transfers, Russell notes), but the house crash-lands across from the falls. Carl needs the boy’s help to drag the house across before its balloons deflate and it becomes sedentary.

On the way, they encounter a big, variegated bird that Russell nicknames “Kevin,” and Dug (Bob Peterson), a dog assigned to track and capture the bird. Dug, like the rest of his pack, is equipped to speak by his mysterious master, and he sputters on dopily with occasional breaks to say, “Squirrel!” Crotchety old Carl wants to have nothing to do with the animals, though Russell quickly befriends them. Kevin is the bird of Muntz’s obsession, and the canine hunters are his henchmen, but their master has gone Ahab—and Muntz’s monomania about clearing his name makes him the villain of the picture. In order to win out, Carl must shed himself of his own idée fixe: He must let his wife and childhood fantasy go, and take responsibility for both Russell (who is, of course, neglected by his own father) and the critters.

At this juncture, the movie’s faults become evident. Though the screenwriter-directors, Pete Docter and Peterson (who also came up with the story with Thomas McCarthy), play it coolly, the boy’s having a distant father is a tad mawkish—though, Up being a children’s movie, one can let that slide. The movie does, however, begin to choke on its pathos in a scene where Russell reprimands Carl for choosing to save his house rather than Kevin. The boy’s accusatory tone is clearly out-of-character—and, on top of that, somewhat unreasonable—so we sense immediately that it’s a cheap trick to force Carl into taking the high road and completing his character arc. Another problem—or kind-of problem—is with Plummer’s performance: His villain, who really should be long dead by now, is still full of juice; and Plummer plays him with such skillful braggadocio that even adults might get goosebumps. Muntz, a cleverly written nemesis who seems inspired by Charles Lindbergh (another heroic aviator whose name has been sullied), might become the bane of impressionable young viewers (and their bleary-eyed parents) during the wee hours of the night. But that’s only to say that Plummer revels in his plum role.

Yet Up is a warm and freshly eccentric movie. It seems to balance Disney cuddliness with Looney Tune impudence—yet it’s harmless enough that a wide audience has scant reason to complain. Last year’s WALL-E was fresh and modern because it combined the lovebirds with the traditional woodland-creature choir, and then mechanized the result. The whole affair was wrapped around an environmentalist message-movie, to boot. But charming as it was, WALL-E was still about old puppy-love; paternity is nothing new to Pixar (thanks to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles), but an old man’s getting over loss and coming to responsibility is. And, aside from the instances referenced, Up doesn’t get weighed down by sentimentality; its tone keeps it buoyant, and its humor keeps it fresh. If the Indiana Jones movies were revisionist history written with a pop-culture pen, Up seems set in a present in which that epical past actually transpired. Up’s mythology is infused with those of The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, King Kong, and even Mike Nichols’s 1973 epic-fail The Day of the Dolphin. But the references aren’t lingered on; they’re all just part of this happy world where anything goes. The old-fashioned tales of heroism and adventure, coupled with the C.G. imagery (whether witnessed with 3D glasses or without) and Michael Giacchino’s dynamic score (a marked improvement over the bombast he composed for J. J. Abram’s Star Trek), help maintain an exuberant, charming—and very home-spun—feeling of romanticism; but the atmosphere itself seems borrowed from old French movies.

This surprising Francophilia is, I think, what keeps Up fresh. It informs this film’s sense of humor, which resembles that of Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders or Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart or François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. (That last film was identified by Pauline Kael as a “comedy about melancholia” and involved the attempts its hero—played by Charles Azvanour—made to dodge his responsibilities as a human being. Azvanour dubbed Carl’s part in the French release of Up.) Of course, Up lacks the depth and bite of these adult-themed foreign films; but the new movie takes the French comedy, Americanizes it, and makes it house-trained, yet manages to keep that loose style’s appeal without affronting it. I laughed out loud when grumpy old Carl called a straight-laced businessman a hippie (in Asner’s perfect get-off-of-my-lawn tone), and again after Muntz’s menacing, sharp-toothed top dog delivered his threats in the voice of a cartoon chipmunk. This sense of surprise is more frequent in Up than it was in any other Pixar picture that I can recall, and the particular type of smile it produces bridges the gap between children and “adults.”

We can’t go back to the days when all entertainment was “family” entertainment, and, personally, I don’t really want to. Sometimes, though, we all need a bit of silly, inoffensive humor to clear our senses—inoffensive, not “safe” (that is, gutless). Up is just goofy enough that its wholesome, straight humor has a slant; and it’s that precarious little edge—that wink from the filmmakers that indicates they’re willing to try something different—that makes Up a real uplift.

Of course, the story within the story is analogous to the plot, and the people Alexandria encounter become characters in the tale. And Roy’s story is lovably absurd, with details shifting and inconsistencies abounding as we see it unfold—and hear it amended by both the stuntman and little girl. These aren’t new storytelling devices, but they’re wonderfully and imaginatively employed here—better even, I think, than they were in two movies that certainly influenced this one: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Princess Bride. One friend complained that the epic quality of the fantasies made the movie seem “important”; I wholeheartedly disagree. Tarsem is never pretentious, and the spectacle never becomes overblown, as it was in, say, The Lord of the Rings, because his spectacle is a celebration of silly banter. The joke is that, despite the care and preparation obviously needed to execute such sequences, the fantasy interludes are made to look improvised, and they’re enormous because we are seeing Roy’s synapse-popping pastiche reverberate in a callow, mesmerized imagination (which is not so incredulous as to disbelieve Roy’s including Charles Darwin as an action hero). At one point, Roy argues that it’s his story; he can tell it however he wants. But Alexandria remonstrates: It’s her story now, too. Tarsem wallows in the shallow battiness of adventure tales, but his movie is not shallow. With the able help of his actors, he brings real emotional depth to The Fall.

Pace (of the darkly humorous T.V. show Pushing Daisies) pulls off a difficult role—a man for whom the audience is meant to feel sympathy, but must reveal a decaying, manipulative and destructive self-pity as the story goes on. These undulations are especially tricky in a film whose point of view comes from a little kid who couldn’t understand such things; we have to see his change of heart occur quietly because he’s putting on an act for Alexandria. For her part, Untaru is a spectacular child actress. With her plump cheeks, she’s not so plastic-pretty as so many little-girl stars, and Alexandria isn’t supernaturally knowing or perceptive like so many of her arbiter-of-innocence movie-children ilk. Her innocent outlook is certainly a crux for the movie’s dramatic machinery, but Alexandria is no softie—she starts off using Roy for the stories just as he’s using her for drugs. Untaru is perfectly believable as a little rascal who doesn’t need to pay attention or tell the truth when she doesn’t want to, but who looks with affection at the world and people around her. Her “innocence” rehabilitates Roy, but he’s no easy nut to crack, and her methods are neither direct nor purposeful—she cares for the man, but doesn’t comprehend his situation, so her goal is to reach a happy ending in his story, not fix her friend’s life.

With all the dark little jokes and deaths (none too graphic) and adult themes, The Fall may end up in the category of movies-for-kids-that-are-really-for-adults. But, unlike another hallmark of that genre, Pan’s Labyrinth (which actually came out the same year as this, although The Fall took two years to reach the U.S.), this movie is truly ideal for kids. The escapist-fantasy scenes here play with a similar idea, but Tarsem doesn’t have Guillermo del Toro’s dark vision; even though Tarsem’s little girl lives the bleak life of a child laborer, she’s escaping because she wants to, not because she needs to. Tarsem slips into Be Kind Rewind/public-television-documentary mode in a retrospective of the silent-film greats in the end, and it’s a little soppy and redundant; but his movie’s creamy and sweet without ever rolling into a cheeseball.

As my brother-in-law put it, WALL-E is “the ‘liberal’ media at its best.” (It’s important to note that he’s skeptical of both the media and the specious accusation that it’s thoroughly “liberal.”) WALL-E plops us down in the dingy 28th century—on a post-human Earth. WALL-E is a wheeling trash-compactor unaware that his creators had turned their entire planet into a dump and subsequently jetted away from it on cosmic luxury liners. Everything in this lonely landscape bears the logo of an apparently all-encompassing, Wal Mart-inspired conglomerate; if the filmmakers had dwelt on this monopoly any more than they have (rather than leave their evidence in the background), the movie would’ve become a chilling modern update of 1984. But this is a kids’ movie, right? Whatever one’s age, one is typically more inclined to be more absorbed by the good-natured scavenger (whose treasures comprise what appears to be the world’s last surviving plant and a V.H.S. copy of cheery Hello, Dolly!, which teaches the machine the virtues of naïve love), and his longing for Eve—a hovering, next-generation iPod deposited on Earth to scout for evidence of photosynthesis—than one is by undertones about corporate oligarchy. The robots’ relationship starts to bloom, and the bashful box-bot shows Eve his plant; but she (I assume WALL-E’s a “he” and Eve’s a “she,” unless this movie’s also into promoting gay rights) immediately enters hibernation mode and dispatches her mother ship.

WALL-E, following Eve, hitchhikes on his beloved’s space pod and eventually becomes a stranger in a strange land: one of the luxury liners, a gargantuan, interstellar shopping mall peopled by self-absorbed blobs on mobile recliners. The ship, christened knowingly by the filmmakers as the Axiom, is in perpetual Disney-cruise mode, and its inhabitants are all coddled to such a degree that they seem to lack self-knowledge or even free will. The same mega-corporation that has littered the Earth into a consumerist trash-heap seems to have sponsored the Axiom, but the company’s employees are long gone—their vocations replaced, it appears, by legions of nifty robots that pamper the portly people. Even the captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin) seems to be occupying a superfluous post; in one of the film’s cleverest bits of satire, we are treated to a wall of captains’ portraits whose subjects got successively fatter as time went by. Eve delivers the little plant to the captain, and it activates an ancient company directive to return the vessel to port—if flora can subsist on Earth, it should be safe now for fauna, too.

Unfortunately, WALL-E, Eve, and the captain are confronted by robots programmed with a secret counter-directive: The conglomerate eventually determined that Earth was no longer salvageable, so the villainous robots (one of which has HAL-9000’s red camera-eye) are compelled to maintain the status quo—to keep the humans pigs in space. (The bad guys’ actions seem to have been inspired by those of the malevolent android played by Ian Holm in Alien. In both movies, a corporate commandments make both human life and liberty secondary.) But here’s where the pedagoguery kicks in: The captain, upon learning about the plant, has caught learning fever! He’s sick of being a complacent blob and wants to try new things like, say, self-determination. In taking a stand against the mutinous machines, he literally takes a stand—lifts his ass up off his floating wheelchair. Apparently, his idealism is unanimously echoed by all of his passengers. (For creatures seeking control of their destinies, they’re rather indistinct as individuals, and almost creepily willing to follow their captain’s lead.) Thanks to the help of WALL-E and Eve, the day is saved; the Axiom lands on barren Earth and the human pioneers have suddenly metamorphosed from insular consumers to agrarians more willing to be self-sustaining than a commune of hippies. And, of course, WALL-E’s wish is fulfilled: like the lovers in Hello, Dolly!, he and Eve finally hold hands.

It’s cute; it’s sweet; it’s impressive. But, its being children’s fare makes WALL-E—unconsciously, I assume—more manipulative than many movies marketed to adults. Even if the global warming warning is valid—and even admirable—the filmmakers’ presumptions are a little unsettling. This is the only kids’ movie I can think of that’s post-apocalyptic, and the issues that have led this world to its demise are far from child’s play—it’s the future as seen by left-wing alarmists. Though it’s too loaded and pretentious to say that the filmmakers actually believe that we’ll necessarily get to a point at which a neo-fascist Earth will have to be evacuated, and that our descendants will be a population of obese sheep, one must admit that the notion that a kids’ movie envisions such a future is staggering. Because WALL-E is so neatly, innocuously packaged, because it’s good enough to put its characters before its patronizing, it’s hard to see how truly frightening it’s scenario is. This isn’t just FernGully, the 1992 animated feature in which a construction company put a forest at stake; the whole world has already been ruined and derelict for 500 years. The movie is, I think, morally in the right in presenting global warming as a problem. There’s something fishy, however, in making such a doomsday prognosis for kiddie eyes and ears. Obviously, adults are in attendance, too—and, so far as I can tell, very happily so—but they are so media-literate that they think WALL-E is transparent. Not so—not to kids.

What’s also rather alarming—or perhaps comforting?—is that this movie, a summer family blockbuster, is parodying itself and its parent. Well, grandparent: Walt Disney. Pixar, the film’s biological mother/father, has never had too comfortable a relationship with its retainer, Disney, whose grip over the animation studio has become gradually weaker but is yet the co-producer and distributor of this picture. If you want to see a monopoly, look at Hannah Montana or the Jonas Brothers, and how the pre-teen market is virtually cornered by these agents for Mickey Mouse. If you want to see monopoly, walk into the nearest Wal Mart (I’m sure it’s not far), and look at the toy aisle lined with WALL-E paraphernalia. Or, to a lesser extent, look at Apple Computers, which corners the market for the graphics software required for this kind of movie to be made—and to which this picture lovingly, and repeatedly, references in its production design and sound bites. When “the Establishment” finally gets hip to an issue like global warming it may wish to prove its capability to be “humane”; but when a movie spouts anti-materialist sentiments and yet is part of a long tradition of merchandising, merchandising, merchandising, is it just blindly chasing its own tail?

WALL-E is a movie so humanly warm and compassionate that it heroizes not only of humans, but also of robots like WALL-E and Eve—byproducts of a treacherous system and yet existential heroes who surmount it. The movie unflinchingly gives its robots free will and elevates them to almost-human status, which is especially meaningful as the humans are also given almost-human status until they decide to take up farming, and unshackle themselves from technologies like WALL-E and Eve. (Perhaps the notion of having automaton protagonists was by attrition: Disney’s normal repertory of bunnies, fawns, mice, and mermaids are extinct by WALL-E’s time.) But, hey, it’s just a kids’ movie, right?