Well, hello WALL·E!
The latest Pixar hit may be the best yet from the CG animation studio behind Toy Story, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. WALL·E director and co-writer Andrew Stanton tells FOCUS how he and his colleagues pulled it off.
The legend has it that, at a lunch in 1994, the top guys at Pixar sketched out the ideas for the films that would go on to become the company's defining movies. It was the genesis of A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and now WALL·E, the latest ingenious offering with its origins in that productive meal.
The problem was that 14 years ago few had heard of Pixar, and no-one was sure whether a computer animated feature would have sufficient audience appeal to make it commercially viable. The release of Toy Story a year later allayed some of those fears, but still it took time for the story of the last robot left on Earth to make it to the screen.
"I think it took five or six more movies for me to get more confident as a filmmaker," says director Andrew Stanton. "About seven years later I was in the middle of Finding Nemo and I found my brain drifting to this little lonely robot, wondering who he is and what the story should be.
"I realised it was his loneliness that appealed to me, and the opposite of loneliness is love, so it should be a love story. And with the idea of a love story combined with the sci-fi genre I was just hooked. I found myself, even during my busiest schedule, hiding in my office, starting to write this. By then I had more confidence that the audience trusted Pixar, that we could go a little more out on a limb, and people might follow us."
The title character WALL·E is a loveably eccentric waste disposal drone who has been tidying up a rubbish strewn world since humankind left it behind some 700 years before. In the course of those centuries he has developed quirks and tastes for the more intriguing items left behind, Rubik's cubes and plastic forks, lighters and strings of Christmas tree lights. And he has developed a love of the musical Hello Dolly!, which he watches over and over on an old videotape.
Such are the highlights of his lonely existence, the upbeat songs of the musical hinting at magical possibilities beyond the litter strewn horizon. But the arrival of EVE a sleek looking robot on a mysterious mission to Earth sets in motion events that will change WALL·E's world forever.
The real quality in the film is that you care about WALL·E, on the one hand a simple robot and essentially a collection of computer code conforming to the design of the Pixar artists. But their artistry is transcendent here, for he is as real as any character in any film, more expressive than many and more loveable than most.
Yet the film also deals with serious issues with a lightness of touch that is breathtaking in its assurance. What other animated family film could tell a humorous love story against a theme of the responsibility we all share to protect the planet?
"I’m the least political guy," Stanton adds, "and the last thing I want is to be preached at when I see something. These things were all there for the larger issue in the story which was to ask 'what's the purpose of living?'. When you say something like that it incorporates everything. I figured I wasn’t going to let fear take something out of the picture just because it happens to be touching on those hot button issues, I was going to do what was right for the movie.
"So I stuck to my guns and kept all these elements in. I've been accused of making certain statements and at the same time I’ve been accused of the opposite sentiment so it's almost more a reflection of the beholder than anything else. What I'll stand behind is that I picked everything in order to reinforce the premise I had which is that irrational love defeats life's programming."
For Stanton the long process of development and creation is at an end, he can only sit back now and witness the reaction to the efforts he and his colleagues put in to a movie that is already being hailed as a masterpiece. Slightly embarrassed by such effusive praise, one senses he is prouder of the fact that an animated movie is being measured by the same standards as any other film. So this may not be the culmination of the art form but a bold new frontier, which hints at a positively optimistic future.
"The sequence that is most special to me in WALL·E was the first one where I went 'that's what I've been trying to get this whole time,'. It's a very small moment, but to me it’s one of the most powerful. It's when EVE is in the truck with WALL·E and she discovers his lighter. We catch him staring at her while she's looking at the flame. To me that had a maturity in using the camera to convey so much emotion that I felt I always get from great movies but I've never seen in animation. At that moment I felt we'd finally tapped into it."
ANWAR BRETT
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Click here to see the interview with WALL·E sound designer Ben Burtt.
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