A Futuristic Film, Made in Homage to the Past

What if we left Earth and someone left the last robot on? This is the remise of Pixar’s latest film, WALL•E, which will be released June 24, and it’s what attracted director Andrew Stanton to the project. “I just thought that was the saddest character I’ve ever heard of,” Stanton said in a phone roundtable interview.

Stanton has been with Pixar since the early days—he worked on each of its CGI animated tales and directed the Oscar-winning hit Finding Nemo. WALL•E, like the company’s previous work, pushes the frontiers of animation and storytelling. It tells the story of WALL•E the robot, who spends his days cleaning the trash of the Earth and discovering all the hidden treasures left by humanity. His only problem: he’s the loneliest character in the universe. But when he discovers EVE, an elite-class robot sent by humans, WALL•E begins an adventure that will take him out of this world.

The origins of Stanton’s involvement in the project date back to a 1994 lunch with Pixar staffers John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft. There, the group first created the ideas behind many of their classic films, including Monsters, Inc. and A Bug’s Life. From the ideas of that brainstorming session, WALL•E is the last to hit cinemas. “It sort of sat out there without a story for a long, long time,” Stanton said. When he did begin to develop the concept, he took ideas from all of film history, especially the golden age of science fiction films—the 1960s through the 1980s. “Those were the films that were in my formative years, so you’re talking about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Alien, all—to me—the classic sci-fi moves of that time.”

But WALL•E has another highly original twist: WALL•E doesn’t actually speak, so there is very little dialogue in the film. Stanton cited the classic Charlie Chaplin film City Lights—the director’s last silent film—as a huge influence. For the script, Stanton developed a new creative process: “When writing the script, I wrote where I expected the character to speak. Sometimes I would literally type in between brackets just the word ‘beeps,’ and then I would write what I wanted those beeps to give the intention of. So in other words, ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘Let’s go over here,’ so I would know what I was trying to communicate.”

WALL•E will also be the first science-fiction film in the Pixar repertoire. “I knew it would have to be sci-fi because it was a robot, and I wanted him to be alone on our planet,” Stanton explained. “So that forces you to have to come up with, ‘Well, where did everybody go and why?’ It made me realize that all sci-fi is typically directly or indirectly some comment on the state of the world or on humanity in general. I really had no agendas or statements. I really just wanted a simple little love story between robots, and that’s hopefully still what the film is. But it did force me to make a decision on which direction do I want humanity to have gone in order to justify that they left and that they need to correct something in order to come back to Earth.”

Of course, a crucial element of the story is the design of WALL•E. The robot had to be a robot, but still be very human, so audiences could relate to him. Stanton recalled the history of the design for the character, including WALL•E’s signature binocular eyes: “I came to the binoculars at a baseball game ... My editor passed me a pair and I missed an entire inning just playing with them and realizing that would be the greatest way to show expression in a feature length film. The rest of the design elements came out of logic: I need something that could compact trash into cubes, it needed to get over all terrains. We worked really hard for the next year and a half making sure that it did things that felt mechanical and limited—based on the logic of the machine—not that made it look like a human or anything.“

Ultimately, Stanton is very excited to see another one of his visions come to the screen. “The one thing that I had that nobody else had was my unique view about stuff, and it was really about honing the skills that were unique about me,” Stanton said. Through modern CGI and working with Pixar, he has found the perfect medium in which his imagination can come alive. “Technology has hit this ceiling where anything you can imagine, you can create,” he declared.