Whatever it is that fuels Pixar’s filmmaking, I want some. At a time when mainstream cinema is vapid and formulaic, summer is a graveyard for braindead blockbusters, and the tv schedules are empty of pretty much anything resembling intelligence, along comes WALL-E.

The sheer scope of the film is staggering. It’s pretty much a creation myth, or at any rate a re-creation myth, although what’s in the foreground most of the time is a touching love story. Between two robots. In a cartoon. And believe me, it’s likely to be one of the most emotionally affecting films you see this year, as well as being a bravura demonstration of filmmaking. Oh, and it’s designed for an audience of 4 and up. Feel humble? You should.

I’m not going to say a great deal more about this film except that you owe it to yourself to experience it if you are at all interested in cinema as an artform. It’s one of the most completely realised visions I’ve seen, an elegaic tale of impossible love that begs the question of whether our species deserves to survive. It would be easy to call it pretentious, but it accomplishes its goals with a lightness of touch that’s breathtaking.

What comes across more than anything in Pixar’s movies is their lack of cynicism. And that’s a beautiful thing to see. When so many producers are second guessing the tolerance of audiences for gross out ‘comedies’ and torture porn, it’s refreshing to encounter an organisation thinking on an epic scale and coming up with such beautiful films for audiences just experiencing their first taste of what cinema has to offer.

It’d be amazing to see something of Pixar’s spirit in the low budget sector in the UK, but all too often I meet aspiring filmmakers who have jaded ideas and no real respect for their potential audience. Some time ago I went to the launch event of one prominent filmmaking initiative and what came across was, first, the unquestionable intelligence of the people behind it and, second, the decidedly questionable aims to which they planned to put that intelligence, creating films that first and foremost were about pulling in identifiable niche audiences. Never mind quality, get those bums onto cinema seats and then off to town to buy the DVD for the price of a pint or three.

Fortunately there are exceptions, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet people who want to make films that find audiences and make money and even have something to say in the process. And that, when it comes down to it, is one of the big differences between film and television: come out of a cinema and you can feel charged up with a sense of how the world could be. That matters, and if there’s one thing I’d like to see in the British film industry it’s more filmmakers with something to say, and no regard for whether that something is fashionable or not. Which in an industry of hustlers, opportunists, and schemers out for a deal, is not a vision that’s very tactical of me, but so be it.