The sci-fi comedy adventure WALL-E is the ninth feature film from the award winning team at Pixar. Set 700 years in the future, the story follows a lonely robot named WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) left on the planet after the humans have abandoned Earth. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton, the man who made us fall in love with a bunch of goofy fish in Finding Nemo, the idea behind WALL-E came about when the Pixar gang was having lunch back in '94 while working on the blockbuster hit that announced the arrival of CG animated movies in no uncertain terms – Toy Story.
"We were batting around just any idea we could think of to try and come up with what the next movie would be," explained Stanton at the LA press day. "One of the sort of the half-framed sentences was, 'Hey, we could do a sci-fi. What if we did the last robot on earth? Everybody's left and this machine doesn't know it can stop and it keeps doing it forever.' And that's really where it started. All the details weren't there. There wasn't even a name of the character. We didn't even know what it would look like. It was just this, the loneliest scenario I'd ever heard and I just loved it. I think that's why it sort of stayed in the ether for so long."
Stanton and his fellow Pixar filmmakers decided this lonely robot would be different in that he wouldn't be human-looking but rather a functional robot. "Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to the movies all my life, I had come to my own conclusion that there were really kind of two camps of how robots had been designed. It's either the Tin Man, which is a human with metal skin, or it's R2D2. It's a machine that has a function and it's designed based on that, and you read a character into it. I was very interested in going with the machine side because to me that was what was fascinating," said Stanton.
"The other thing that I think really motivated me to want to, or even all of us to see a film like this, is that we had… John [Lasseter] had made Luxo Jr, this little short about a lamp that hops around that's just an appliance. It's not even made to look like a character. It just happened to be an appliance that you could easily, by its own natural design, throw a character onto it. And that is powerful. I've had to watch that thing about a thousand times and I always am like, just before we put it on, I go, 'Jeez, we've got to watch this again,' and I get caught up every time. I said, 'There is some unique power to that type of bringing a machine to life than other kinds of machines that are designed to look like a character.'"
Stanton continued, "I started to put it into the category of why we are so attracted to pets and infants. Because I think there's something about something that's already appealing where you're kind of charmed by it, but it can't communicate fully. And you want, you're compelled, you almost can't stop yourself from finishing the sentence. 'Oh, I think it likes me. I think it's hungry. I think it wants to go for a walk.' And I think what it does, I'm getting really geeky here but this is really where my head was at for a long time, was I think you pull from your own emotional experiences to finish the sentence. So it becomes twice as powerful. I think that's why love at first sight works in movies. Nobody says anything. The guy or the girl stares at the other person. That other person walks across the room, and you go racing back to when it happened to you. You're using that personal emotional experience to fuel that moment in the movie. And I said, 'Wow, what if you could get a character that did that to you through a whole movie, just like Luxo does for about a minute and half to two minutes on the short?' I think that's really what made us from day one go, 'That would be a really powerful movie. I don't know how hard that would be to achieve, but I know that if you achieved it, it would be really powerful.' So, in a weird way, we never questioned that you could succeed at it."
Strange as it may sound, it was while at a baseball game that Stanton got the inspiration for WALL-E's face. "Somebody handed me their binoculars. I hadn’t designed WALL-E yet. I knew he had to compact trash so I knew he was going to be a box at the most basic thing. I knew that he was going to collapse to possibly show that he's shy. That's all I had, and I honestly was thinking of putting just a single cone lamp on there because I loved how much you just read a face into the simplicity of Luxo. But I thought, 'I don't know if that's going to hold for 90 minutes.' And then when I got handed these binoculars at a baseball game, I missed the entire inning. I just turned the thing around. I started staring at it. I started making it go sad and happy and then mad and then sad. I remember doing that as a kid with my dad's binoculars. I said, 'It's all there. There's no nose, there's no mouth. There's nothing.' It's not trying to be a face. It just happens to ask that of me when I look at it. I said, 'That's it. I can't improve upon that.'"
The film carries an important environmental message about taking care of our planet, however Stanton says that wasn't his main objective when he set about creating WALL-E. "That was not where I was coming from when I did that stuff. I knew I was going into territory that was basically the same stuff, but I don't have a political bent. I don't have an ecological message to push. I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view. It's certainly a good citizen way to be. But everything I want to do was based on the love story. I wanted the last robot on earth – that was the sentence that we came up with in '94. I have to get everybody off the planet. I have to do it in a way that you get it without any dialogue. You have to be able to get it visually in less than a minute, so trash did that. You look at it, you get it. It's a dump and you've got to move that. Even a little kid understands that, and it makes WALL-E at the lowest of the totem pole and it allowed him to sift through everything that we’ve left on the planet to show you that he's interested in us. So I had to look at everything from the point of view of what will you get visually without having dialogue describe stuff to you."
