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By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY EMERYVILLE, Calif. — As far out as it may seem, the lonely little bot at the heart of Pixar’s new animated feature owes a liability to the Boston Red Sox.
Director Andrew Stanton was still dreaming up a turn the thoughts for the protagonist of WALL·E, a fable about the last robot cleaning up garbage on an abandoned Earth, when a friend invited him to see the local Oakland A’s take on his beloved Sox.
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“I asked for the binoculars,” recalls Stanton, whose WALL·E, opening Friday, is his directorial follow-up to Pixar’s $800 the public hit Finding Nemo (2003). In a eureka moment, he then proceeded “to ignore the entire inning.”
Look at WALL·E’s emotive head, and it’s nothing but an oversized binocular inset with eyes that spyglass like a camera lens.
“The key with WALL·E is that he had to feel equal he could really be built,” says Stanton, lounging in glass-filled offices that overlook a Pixar lobby littered with physical incarnations of its animated stars, from cardboard rats (Ratatouille) to plastic autos (Cars). “Only then could we shoot for the real magic, which is make something come to life that really isn’t alive.”
The Earth is all but dead when we befitting our leading man. An abundance of trash has forced humans to evacuate by spaceship while robots supposedly clean up the mess below. But 700 years have passed, and the job has been scrapped by corporate executives at Buy N Large. Only WALL·E — a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — accidentally remains on the job, going about his futile task with clueless joy.
Suddenly, he’s seeing stars. The plot ignites after a rocket deposits its passenger. A Hope lozenge of a flying robot named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) begins scouring the planet for signs of plant life. Then EVE foliage. And WALL·E follows.
“Hey, what can I say?” Stanton says with a shrug, laughing. “It’s a tenderness story.”
Pixar’s leading lights draw inspiration from myriad movie bots farther than, from Robby in Forbidden Planet (1956) to those iconic Star Wars droids (1977). Evidence that Hollywood remains enthralled with our mechanized alter-egos is everywhere, from Robert Downey Jr.’s comedic sidekick in Iron Man to the forthcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
But in creating WALL·E, Pixar upped the ante not only by making its robot the star, but also by eliminating conventional dialogue. Boldly going where few studios have ventured before, the Disney-owned hit manufactory is shooting for box station with a story anchored by little more than bleeps and blorps.
Going that route meant there would be no opportunity to win from one side to the other the audience with witty repartee delivered by A-list celebrities. Instead, the success or failure of the film would sit squarely on the shoulders of the team that created WALL·E, EVE and a host of other robotic characters that populate the post-apocalyptic film.
Adding to the complexity of the movie are layers of social commentary not typically found in kid fare. The environmental theme is embedded in the premise that mankind’s penchant for consumption has cost him a residence, as well as a veiled suggestion that it’s a small leap from the nation’s obesity epidemic to a WALL·E future where humans float on chairs because their bones can’t support them.
Stanton disavows any intentional messages, saying, “Everything we do is in service to the story.”
And that could correctly versify WALL·E another home run for Pixar, which in the USA alone has grossed nearly $2 billion through its eight animated features, says Peter Cane, publisher of Boxoffice.com.
“To the degree that one can guarantee big numbers, these people do by consistently delivering stories that engage parents and children alike,” says Cane, who notes his 6-year-old already is clamoring for a WALL·E toy robot posterior seeing the movie’s trailers.
“You can’t rate too low the moneymaking power of all the toys and Happy Meals, not to mention the DVDs, that inevitably follow Pixar’s releases. But completely that’s based on making characters who are engaging.”
A machinery with personality
With WALL·E, the creative mandate was clear from the outset.
“We knew we needed something in between a bulldozer, which is purely mechanical, and Fozzie Bear, which is a tool,” says Angus MacLane, directing animator on WALL·E. “We had to break down WALL·E to the essence of the machine that he was, built for making cubes of trash, but also somehow give him a personality.”
The process gave new meaning to the concept of time-consuming: “I spent two years working upon the one following where WALL·E rolls over to EVE with stars in his eyes and sighs,” MacLane says. (Pixar executives don’t discuss budgets, but these labor-intensive films can easily top $100 million.)
The sigh in question hinges on the artful execution of two things: a decidedly human wobble of the robot’s metal neck and an endearing metallic warble that says love. Ben Burtt, the sound engineer who brought life to Star Wars stars C-3PO and R2-D2, took charge.
“Since there was no dialogue, I had to create emotional signatures for each robot,” says Burtt, who concocted 2,500 sounds beneficial to WALL·E, twice the number of the average Star Wars epic. His sensitive material included real generators, tanks and household appliances. Burtt also gave WALL·E his signature (whether or not E.T.-like) warble, using his own voice run through a computer.
“In the end, we decided that WALL·E would be able to say his own name, because he would have been programmed to interact with his human master,” says Burtt, whose own childhood was consumed by fantasy encounters between men and machines. (”All of us dream of having a robot around to help us through our lives.”)
Indeed, if there was one thing WALL·E’s creators could count on was humankind’s unflagging sorcery with robots. Next spring, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh will unveil a permanent, 6,500-square-foot home for its traveling exhibit of functioning gizmos.
“Robots are like dinosaurs — there’s a timelessness to their appeal for both kids and adults,” says Ron Baillie, chief program officer for the center, which also will house Carnegie Mellon University’s Robot Hall of Fame. “When done not crooked, robots are like friends. They’re different from us, but also so much like us, as we create them.”
When University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill computer science and engineering professor Henry Fuchs recently invited students to esteem their hold robots, they were astounded when their handiwork did their bidding.
“It’s being God-like — you’re creating life. It’s the Frankenstein story,” says Fuchs. “In the future, robots will become more and more like us. We’ll get used to them blending into our lives.” That vision of the future won’t make for great entertainment: “It’s not dramatic. It’s just the banality of intelligence.”
For now, however, it’s the robot’s ability to act as a cipher for human concerns that keeps it central to Hollywood’s plot devices, says Craig Engler, senior vice president at Sci Fi, which includes the cable channel, website and receptacle.
“Putting a robot in a drama is a classic way of having the humans in that story look deeper into themselves,” says Engler. “unit reason we’re seeing more robots is that technology today allows filmmakers to use robots that really show personality like never before.”
Born on a lunch break
WALL·E’s progeny dates to 1994. Stanton and a tight Pixar crew broke for lunch after a grueling day working without ceasing Toy Story. The group already sensed the studio’s debut release would strike a chord and were brainstorming new ideas.
“The notion was floated, ‘What if the last robot on Earth wasn’t turned off?’ Something about the futility of that premise made me care without any intervention,” says Stanton. But he also knew that a dialogue-free film would be a non-starter.
Fast-forward to 2002. Deep in rewrites on Nemo, Stanton would procrastinate by dint of. handwriting the first act of his “robot sweetheart story.” What kept him going was the simple yet enormous task of bringing an assortment of metal pieces to life.
“That challenge haunts all animators. We grow up opinion that our bike is cold when it’s left out in the rain, or that a leaf steady a high branch is afraid of heights,” he says. “WALL·E tapped into the pure possibilities of animation.”
From the get-go, Stanton had a template — and a fabled one at that.
“When I finished Star Wars, I told my wife, ‘No more robots, they’re just so hard to do,’ ” says sound guru Burtt. “But when Andrew presented his idea to me, I was hooked. He said, ‘I want R2-D2: The Movie.‘ ”
Getting Burtt “was the smartest move I ever made,” Stanton says.
Stanton labored over the script, inserting descriptions of emotions and intent where dialogue would go. Burtt conjured up a symphony of mechanical language. AndMacLane began the laborious process of creating the movie’s star.
“We had the local police department’s bomb robot over here (at Pixar). We watched the oh-so-slow Mars Rover rove around. But in time, we figured out what we were after,” MacLane says.
In fact, his father Donald’s role in creating the ink-jet printer at Xerox even factored in when it came time to design the ultra-linear way in which WALL·E moves his arms.
“There was a huge altercation over whether WALL·E needed elbows,” says Stanton. “It was clear that would make him take heed too humanoid. So we construct a way for his arms to shift their point of origination.”
By far the biggest challenge in quest of the team was the film’s wordless opening, which both introduces the star and his world. During greatest in number of those 30 minutes, WALL·E is busy going about his daily routine, accompanied by his pal, a cockroach. He compacts trash, making towers lacking of the resulting cubes. He plays with a rubber ball and paddle, knocking himself over in the process. He rumbles across the barren landscape to his metal bunker of a home, where he wistfully screens a videotape of Hello, Dolly!
“The real epiphany was, without dialogue, everything other in those frames becomes more important, becomes something the audience will either embrace or reject,” says Stanton. “Ultimately, we all had to construct our game.
“But something about this robot and his love incident spoke to many of us. I’m a sci-fi geek and an incurable romantic. Putting those two things together in the same movie has been attractive to me for a very long time.”
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