In a blah year for animation, Wall-E won’t have much competition in the Oscars’ best animated feature category. But can it sneak into the best picture nominations?

The main competition seems to be Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button*, and Gran Torino, with Frost/Nixon, Happy-Go-Lucky, Milk and I suppose The Dark Knight** in contention as well.

In this mix, Wall-E stands out for its formalist storytelling, elegant Tati-ian first half-hour, and innovative love story. As I wrote last year, however, the implications of its message have not yet been fully explored. As I see it, the film is a direct assault on America in general and American movie-goers in particular, portraying them as recumbent blobs, confined to video-screen-equipped Rascals either because they can’t ambulate anymore or because it’s just that much easier to move when you have to carry a Big Gulp around all the time.

But whether you agree with or approve of it, more interesting is how that message wasn’t part of the discussion of the film when it came out. By the simple expedient of not drawing attention to the film’s obvious jeremiad, Pixar used the analytical lassitude of the nation’s film critics to avoid talking about it.

(One or two mentioned it, but most didn’t. A few right-wing critics got het up about some of the film’s other themes. One of these was the despoiling of the earth, but that’s a fairly uncontroversial contention. Another was the focus on a Wal-Mart-like conglomerate as the source of the world’s ecological problems. But those are much different issues than the broadside.)

The other bullet Pixar dodged is discussion of Wall-E’s box office. Box office reporting is a fungible world with no clear rules. I’ve never really understood how Hollywood reporters decide that the budget or box office of one film is important and another not; I don’t have the sense that anyone is systematically looking at box office patterns to catch wrinkles.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any discussion of how Pixar’s formidable box office muscles have been weakening. I’m not buying into the money-equals-quality equation, here; the excellence of the films is a different matter. While no one was looking Pixar became a massively successful company seemingly run entirely by artists. And the company’s probably never going to lose money on a movie.

Still: Wall-E is the fourth film in a row that has brought Pixar’s per-film average down.

For Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., Pixar averaged a $350 million North American gross, adjusted for inflation. The company’ last four films have averaged $250 million; its last three films $235 million, and last two films $217 million.

Pixar makes a lot of money overseas and from toys; and there hasn’t been a Shrek-sized animated hit in a while from any studio.

But Wall-E’s tepid box office ($223 million, just above Ratatouille’s $212 million) is pretty portentous as it moves forward under the Disney aegis.

Why? Because the film lacks the problems of the studio’s other recent releases. The appeal of Cars was overestimated from the get-go: hard to romanticize the things that every schoolkid learns are polluting the earth.

And a rat as a cook?

Wall-E doesn’t have a conceptual roadblock like that, and got reviews as good as any Pixar film, which is saying something. Yet still it hasn’t done that well. Oscars or no, is the Pixar brand fading?

* Benjamin Button has originality of conception and Fincherian technique going for it. But it’s also one of those movies about a central character who is just … the central character. Brad Pitt does a decent job with what he’s given, but in the end Button is just … the guy they made a movie about. He has no personality, no world view, no character arc and very little to do except … be the focus of the movie.

** The Dark Knight remains a chaotic mess whose plot is senseless and whose alleged themes, nattered on about endlessly by fan boys and the critics, are superficial or incoherent. Here’s an example: At one point, the Joker, confronting Harvey Dent, has a dramatic, key speech, something to the effect that, “Society just doesn’t care if a truckload of soldiers die, or if a kid in the ghetto gets killed. It’s all part of The Plan. But you say you’re going to shoot one little mayor, people go crazy. They are afraid of chaos!”

Well, duh.

And the much bruited-about discussion of the importance of Harvey’s Dent’s remaining a symbol of the rule of law is pretty silly in the context of a movie about a vigilante.

I’m not a Watchmen head, but one of its virtues is that it doesn’t, tritely, try to undermine the conventions of the genre it deigns to work in. It makes it deeper and more realistic, follows the implications of the superhero character out a few logical steps, and builds consistent layers of nuance and depth throughout, all the while keeping focus on the ever-more-exciting plotline.

The Dark Knight, by contrast, is built upon so many awkward narrative twists it makes your head hurt. If the Joker wants to cause chaos and fight Batman, why doesn’t he just do that?  Why go to all the trouble of stealing from the mob, and then going to them asking them to pay him to fight Batman? He was already stealing their money, and he was already harassing Batman. And did he really stage the Imax underground semi-truck action sequence so that Batman would lasso his truck so he could pretend to be captured and arrested and taken to the jail so he could sneak in a bomb that would go off so he could get to the banker guy? Why didn’t he just, you know, sneak in a bomb to the jail and blow it up with the banker guy in it?

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Previously in Hitsville:

Beating up on “Wall-E”

The “Wall-E” debate continues: The far right attacks!

The critical conundrum of “Wall-E” 

What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice?