For those of us who love animated films, there’s nothing sadder than a magical story that takes itself too seriously and can’t stop preaching in the end. “Happy Feet” was this sort of disappointment and I regret to report that “WALL-E” suffers a similar fate.

WALL-E is a trash compacting robot who has been going merrily about his task for some 700 odd years. It seems that the Earth had become so overrun with trash that the humans set up space colonies and left robots behind to clean up. WALL-E spends every day scooping up scrap metal, compacting it into square blocks and building giant spiraling towers of these blocks.

Apparently the earth was once covered with similar robots building similar towers, but now there’s just this one. Our hero is a plucky little soul who occupies himself between trips compacting trash by collecting choice items in a cooler. He then sorts and stores his treasures back at the home he’s made for himself and a friendly cockroach.

He has a bin for each spare part he might need to repair himself. He also collects light bulbs and rubber ducks and Rubik’s cubes. He’s rigged up solar power and even set up an iPod where he watches scenes from “Hello, Dolly!” every evening.

Then one day he has company. A rocket ship leaves behind a sleek new robot named Eve. She begins scanning the area while WALL-E watches from a distance. After he narrowly escapes her notice (and her ray guns) a number of times, the two begin communicating.

Eve is on a classified mission. She has been sent by the humans to find a living plant. Such a find would signal that the Earth’s surface was ready to sustain life and would therefore be habitable for humans again.

Up to this point I was convinced that “WALL-E” was Pixar’s finest film.

Here was a story told without dialog. We learn everything through the eyes of its characters. The art is expansive and beautiful and funny.

WALL-E is an animated Buster Keaton — running into walls and knocking himself over because he’s so distracted by a girl.

But then these two lovely creatures end up on the space colony with all the pathetic humans and the magic spell is broken. The film eventually ends up back where it started, thank goodness, but in the meantime there’s quite a bit of silliness to get through.

The messiest bit of plot involves the humans having become so complacent that the robots nearly manage to take over. But the character who is meant to be the villain isn’t well established. Certainly the true villain is human complacency but the story still needs an evil character to take advantage of that flaw.

It’s fun to note that according to this film, humanity’s first crime against the planet is our great love of stuff. But as any parent can tell you, there is no greater purveyor of “stuff” than the company that made this film. Disney is as guilty as any other Earth company of teaching young humans the joys of collecting stuff. I wonder how many “WALL-E” promotional toys the archeological robots of the future will find in our landfills?

In spite of its flaws, don’t miss “WALL-E.” The first half is groundbreaking. I was completely lost in WALL-E’s world. We can just hope that Pixar will someday sustain such magic through an entire film.