Drifting without direction, crippled by convenience and firmly affixed to the furniture, the hamster-like humans featured in Pixar’s recent animated epic are meant to remind us of ourselves – those of us still inhabiting this obsolete orb called Earth. It’s a light-hearted but heart-breaking exposé of our tendencies to become motionless machines of malaise. Funnily enough, in the midst of our laconic laziness, it’s a robot that is reminding us how to be human.

If you’ve ever wished you were more inquisitive and adventurous, and able to find meaning and value in the mundane refuse that surrounds you, you should meet Wall*E. The tiny tank-like trash-compactor robot from the movie of the same name, Wall*E is a binary binner that puts the most avid dumpster-diver to shame. He can find more excitement in a thrown-away VHS tape of an old musical than most of us exhibit when we encounter major milestones in our lives.

Seeing Wall*E celebrate what the rest of us would abandon, and innovate where the rest of us would have given up, was embarrassingly enlightening. It was as if Wall*E had called me an unimaginative and lethargic sad-sack who should start being more grateful and involved with my surroundings and clean up after myself. Except, of course, this was communicated through chirps, beeps, metal fingers tapping together, timid politeness, and plenty of old-timey musicals.

Sometimes, when an episode of Gilmore Girls shows up on my TV (I’m not sure how they keep doing that, although I’m starting to suspect my wife might have something to do with it), I find it hard to focus on all the Stars Hollow drama. It’s not that Luke’s Diner doesn’t have enough gossip to go around: it’s just that the dialogue hogs all the attention. It seems the screenwriters are hijacking each piece of dialogue as means of showing off their own cleverness.

It’s like that with the movie Juno: the leading lady’s mouth produces a non-stop stream of well-written idioms and clever proclamations that seem uncomfortably out-of-place in a 16-year-old. It’s less like character development, and more like ventriloquism. While Juno’s motormouth provides the bulk of the levity in the movie, it certainly makes it a little harder to believe she is anything more than a deliberately constructed container for the screenwriter’s ideas.

“It’s just that you’re so cool and you don’t even try,” confesses Juno near the end of the movie, to a shuffling Paulie Bleeker. “Actually,” he stammers back, his voice squeaking a bit. “I try really hard.”

Like Bleeker, Juno is a movie caught awkwardly between earnestness and pretentiousness. The visual and sonic ideas are precious and artful, but its cleverness kind of clouds the sincerity. By the time Juno and Bleeker are playing their acoustic duet at the end of the show, it’s hard to tell if Juno has actually changed that much from the Stooges-loving 70s-punk-rock chick she claimed to be, or if it’s just another excuse to include a great song.

Best moment: The opening credits, a live/animated hybrid accompanied by a great folk song called “All I Want is You,” by a guy I’ve never heard of named Barry Loius Polisar.

Most questionable moment: The abundance of Napoleon Dynamite-isms. One of the very first spoken lines in the movie is this: “Jeez Banana, shut your friggin’ gob, okay?” I kept expecting Juno to bust out the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt.