Disney animators don’t normally hang out in junkyards or recycling centres, but if you’re making a movie like WALL-E, your research can take you down some unexpected byways.
The artists behind the animated adventure needed to know how society deals with trash. That’s because of the film’s premise: what if the human race had to leave planet Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?
The robot in question is the diminutive but dutiful WALL-E (a.k.a. Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) who has spent several centuries doing what he was built to do - collecting and compacting rubbish from a planet so overwhelmed by trash that the humans responsible for it finally had to flee.
Animators wanted to be authentic in those scenes where Wall-E rumbles through garbage dumps, loading refuse onto his shovel and then reducing it to neat compressed blocks.
“So we actually went to real recycling centres to see how they condensed trash and put it all together,” director Andrew Stanton explains. “One of the fascinating things to us was that there already was a manner in which things were cubed and stacked that exactly matched what we wanted to do in the film for aesthetic reasons. So that worked in our favor.”
It’s taken more than a decade for the idea behind WALL-E to hatch, and when the film finally received the green light, Stanton and his colleagues at Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios had no idea that it would emerge as an environmental story with a built-in appeal for the green movement.
“When you plan something early on, you don’t have a crystal ball telling you what’s going to be the current of the time five, six, seven years out,” Stanton said during a visit to Toronto. “I was just going for what naturally made sense with the storyline I was doing. I wanted things that were ‘gettable’ visually - things that would make sense to an audience without explanation, even to a kid. The fact that trash is everywhere is an easy thing to visualize - as it is to show that it needs correction.”
But at the very beginning, back in 1994, when Stanton and his screenwriting buddies got together for an idea session, he wasn’t sure whether they had anything more than an interesting concept.
“We had the character and the initial situation - that this working robot’s been left on earth - and that’s where it stopped. I didn’t know where that was going, I didn’t know what it was about. I just knew this was the loneliest character situation I could ever encounter.”
Those were the early days of Pixar animation. Disney had yet to release the company’s first computerized creation, Toy Story, a film which was to revolutionize animation technology, but its youthful gung-ho artists were already overflowing with further ideas.
They had met to discuss future Pixar projects like A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. But there was also this mere germ of an idea about the last functioning robot on earth.
“In that same early time that we came up with that situation, we also said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it was sort of like R2-D2 (from the Star Wars films), that it spoke with the integrity of the way it was built?
“And immediately we thought, ‘Nobody will ever let us do a film like that.’
“We were just young guys who at the time were still figuring out how to do Toy Story. So we sort of put it on the mental shelf and went off to do all those other films everybody else knows - which pretty much took all our time for 10 years.”
It wasn’t until Stanton was immersed in his first directing assignment, Finding Nemo, that he started thinking about the robot idea again.
“Now that I had a couple of films under my belt and was a better writer, I was more fascinated with the challenge of what a movie like that would be like. So I really got serious about it in 2003, and I started to flesh out what you guys now know as WALL-E.”
The movie introduces audiences to the solitary existence of WALL-E whose only stimulus outside of rubbish disposal comes from the pet cockroach who is his sole companion, a collection of discarded knick-knacks he’s set aside and an ancient video player with fascinates WALL-E with its flickering images of scenes from an ancient movie version of Hello Dolly. But then his life changes when a sleek and attractive research robot named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is dispatched back to earth by the exiled human race and discovers that WALL-E has inadvertently discovered the possible key to a blighted planet’s return to health. WALL-E finds himself smitten with EVE and he follows her when she races back through the galaxy to a luxury space ship and the humans who await her findings.
The boyish, bearded and bespectacled Stanton says that, among other things, WALL-E is also a love story, although he concedes with a grin that he doesn’t really think that robots are capable of emotion.
“I think it’s unique to this movie frankly. It’s very much of an animator’s sensibility to want to give life to inanimate objects, which is pretty much the definition of an animator.”
Animators also revel in challenges - and giving life and personality to a robot was a major task.
“It was so invigorating to play in such a subtle pool and to have everything so minute that when you did something as simple as a tilt of a head or a movement of the iris, it meant a lot and was the equivalent of doing huge broad action.”
Much of WALL-E unfolds like a silent move with music and sound effects.
WALL-E communicates through squeaks, rattles and various other “robot” noises - his “voice” is the creation of Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt, the artist who was also behind the voice of R2-D2.
“I wanted you to be as charmed as you could be with WALL-E, so that the more you believed there was this three-dimensional box sitting there, rusting in the dust, the more charming it would be when it came to life,” Stanton says.
He also emphasizes that WALL-E is something unusual in the field of feature animation - a science fiction movie - “so we also loved the challenge of a different genre to play in.”
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