WALL• E

[Kal]

Andrew then discussed the plot while concept art scrolled by. In the future, humans have completely trashed the planet with rampant commercialism. They then leave the planet on space liners while robots are left behind to clean up the planet. Unfortunately, 700 years go by and they never return. Eventually one robot, WALL•E, develops a personality. As he roams the planet, he eventually finds a way to get off the planet. He then finds the last remaining space liner containing the 'lost tribe' of humans. However, years in space with all their needs covered by robots have made them literal couch potatoes. They are huge, helpless blobs. Along the way WALL•E also meets and falls in love with another robot named Eve. WALL•E attempts to woo her, but his efforts just might be what ends up restoring the human race to its former glory.

i don't care how spoilerful that synopsis might turn out to be, it's the best story i've heard in a long time. instant classic.

me too... i cant wait to see that footage they showed in comiccon.

[MacGuffin]

SDCC 07 - Pixar's WALL•E Promo Postcards
Source: KungFuRodeo

I feel like I should be saving some of this for next week, but the heck with it - here are scans of all five of the promotional postcards that were being given away to promote the next Pixar flick, WALL•E. The discoloration in the scans is all a part of the magic, folks, making these things look nice and vintage. Without having seen frame one of the movie, I'm now officially more excited about this Pixar movie than I have been since the Incredibles was announced.

[grand theft sparrow]

I had a conversation about this movie the other night.  My friend thinks they have another Finding Nemo on their hands, and I don't think he's even really aware that it's the same director.  After reading that synopsis, I'm inclined to agree. 

After seeing the relative lack of interest in Ratatouille, I was convinced that if WALL• E meets our borderline irrational expectations, then it will probably be their lowest-grossing movie.  But everyone seems to be madly in love with him, and a full year before it comes out.  He's cute and shit and there's a love story too... little kids will be shitting in their parents' faces if they don't see this movie/buy the dolls immediately and by 2009, they'll be breaking ground on WALL• E World in Florida.

[cron]

beauuuuuuuuuuuutiful design. i want that m-o postcard as a big poster in my bedroom.
damn it pixar, you bring the best in all of us poor mortals

[Redlum]

This film really seems like it should be dialogue free. Given the reference to 'City Lights', details of Ben Burtt's involvement and no announcement of any voice talent (I think), it looks promising on that front.

[Ravi]

This film really seems like it should be dialogue free. Given the reference to 'City Lights', details of Ben Burtt's involvement and no announcement of any voice talent (I think), it looks promising on that front.

I doubt the entire thing will be dialogue-free but I read that a significant portion of it will be.

[picolas]

no announcement of any voice talent (I think)

The main roles will be "voiced" electronically by Ben Burtt, the wizardly sound designer behind Star Wars.

+ the voice of R2-D2

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive Interview: Andrew Stanton
The director of Finding Nemo and the forthcoming Wall-E talks about his latest cinematic creation.

Even among Pixar's pedigreed writers and directors, Andrew Stanton stands out. The writer and animator cut his teeth on films like Toy Story and A Bug's Life before graduating to directing in 2003 with Finding Nemo, a film which won him an Academy Award. Subsequently, Stanton has contributed his voice to projects like Brad Bird's The Incredibles and continues to develop features, the latest of which is Wall-E, scheduled for release in May of 2008.

Stanton appeared last week at the San Diego Comic-Con to promote Wall-E, offering fans a plot synopsis and a first look at footage. The film takes place in the future, where a little robot left behind on Earth aspires to venture off into space and find the humans he was programmed to clean up after. Following the presentation, Stanton spoke with IGN in an exclusive interview that turned out to be the very first he has done thus far for the forthcoming film.

IGN: Watching and listening to the Comic-Con footage I was immediately reminded of folks like Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham, who are always tinkering with technology. How much practical design went into coming up with how the robots would look and function?

Andrew Stanton: There wasn't really a chicken and egg kind-of issue. To be honest, just because I've watched people watch Luxo, Jr. for almost 15 years now again and again when they come to Pixar, it fascinates me that I still get caught up in it. There's something about the fact that it doesn't have a face; you treat it as an appliance first, not as a character with gloves and hands and stuff, that just makes you really invest even more in it than you would a different kind of character. That was almost like base knowledge as an animator, at least working at Pixar; you just know the power of that. So it just felt to me like a robot was an obvious choice to take it to the next level, and that kind of place where you would have an even larger vocabulary of sounds and movements to interpret and to infer things and get more audience participation and payoff than you would for a character just telling you what they think and telling you how they feel.

We just knew that from the get-go, so basically knowing that was our goal -- everything, artistic choices, sound choices, just literally like throwing spaghetti on the wall and going, "Does it help? Does it hurt? Does it spell it out too much, or does it help you get more involved?" It's really just been an education for all of us as we go through it. It still is, even as we do every scene; how are we going to tell people that he's sad right here, or whatever. It's like getting to be in film school at the same time while you get the chance to make a full-on film.

IGN: How did you decide how human you wanted to make the robots in Wall-E, since there is a natural inclination to anthropomorphize characters in animated films? In the footage you showed, there is a lot of manual button-pushing instead of cables and programs, like one might expect would "drive" a robot or computer.

Stanton: Most of it's driven by story. It's driven by either what the story needs, or because you're not using traditional dialogue a lot of the time. You're using other ways to communicate -- even when a character may literally be speaking, you can't really spell it out. You'll do whatever will convey it. Communication becomes the ruling factor about why you decide this character's going to push a button, this character's going to use a program, so hopefully once you know you've communicated the story point, you can sew it all together and make it seem like one grand design and not be too inconsistent throughout the film. But first and foremost are we communicating a story point and the emotion and all of the things we need to do. And then sometimes we'll go through all of the harder tasks of making it all have continuity.

IGN: Is it important how something works logically within that universe?

Stanton: It comes from both ends. Sometimes it comes from "this decision makes so much sense to me, this is the way it has to work. Now we have to find a way to make it appealing." Or, the other camp is, "it's so appealing we've got to find a way to justify why we can use it." You don't close your mind or your ears to any possibility. I told Steve Jobs it's like making a movie by Braille -- you're just sort of feeling your hands through, "Oh, I feel like that works." And slowly you build up enough that you start [recognizing] what your unconscious rules are, and you start following those rules. We're about two-thirds of figuring out our way through that world.

IGN: What's interesting about what we saw at the panel was how little dialogue there is -- almost a pantomime storytelling style.

Stanton: That's the thing I feel is a misnomer because everybody talks in this movie and everybody speaks and expresses their feelings about things, and when you watch it you don't feel like you're being denied anything. So that's our goal, [and] I feel like it's a completely wrong way to express it if you say there's no dialogue. There's dialogue from the first frame of that film on, it's just that we're being much more respectful to the integrity of each of those characters and how they would speak. The biggest thing I want is, and I kept comparing it to "R2-D2 The Movie," was I just want you to believe that little box is really there, and it literally has feelings and it's trying to figure things out. So if it starts talking all of the time in human language, it's going to feel illogical; I don't think we would have designed a box to do that.

We might have designed a box to have a certain key word or phrase, you know, like if you could make your Roomba work a little bit smarter you might add a couple of key words. So we try to use that logic: What would its purpose be in the context of the film, how would it be used, and does that justify it? Sometimes there are characters that do have actual English lines to say, only if it fits in the logic of why that thing was built -- what reason it was built for. So if you do it right, you watch the film and you don't ever feel denied of anything.

IGN: In a larger sense, is there any kind of responsibility you adopt as a filmmaker given the scope and appeal of Pixar's that there must be a certain level of clarity that people can attach themselves to?

Stanton: Adults tend to be slower at getting things than kids, so I'm always using the phrase, "This has to work on a level that a two year-old would get." It's not because I care who the audience is, it's because I know that if the two year-olds get it then everybody will get it. So yeah, definitely, but it's just about clarity. It's truly not about who your audience is. We never think about that. We just don't want to deny anybody access to understanding the movie.

IGN: How much do you hold yourself to a complete science-fiction fabric for this film? Thomas Newman's score, for example, doesn't sound like you're aiming for Wendy Carlos-style futurism.

Stanton: I'm embracing it. Like I said in [the panel], that was my favorite era of movies, and I've been wanting Tom since I started talking to him literally at the Oscars for Nemo. I said, here's the next thing, and I'm going to ask you to do stuff you don't normally do. I want a big opera, a big space waltz and stuff that we remember from the '70s that's kind of classic to the genre, so get ready. I know this is stuff you don't normally do. I don't know if you heard his score for The Good German, but he started to do this great retro [sound]; but he's so original that there's no way he can just do what has been done before. He has to give it his touch, and that's the thing -- you're guaranteed originality. So I think I'm going to get the best of both worlds with him; I am so far.

IGN: How does Wall-E fit into the Pixar canon in terms of age appeal or maturity?

Stanton: One of the keys to us is we've never thought about our audience, or never thought about who our audience might be. We honestly are just making the movies that we want to make, that if we didn't show it to anybody else but ourselves we'd be fine. So if that happened to be the 12-year old in me, that's fine, or if that happened to be the 18-year old in me, [fine]. There's no rhyme or reason and we're making it up as we go along. There is no master plan or group of people in a room sitting and going, "What age are we speaking to?" We never had a dialogue like that, so it's the exact opposite. We are going by the seat of our pants making films we'd want to see. Maybe when I look back and I'm sitting on my therapist's couch, I'll go, "Oh, that was when my son was graduating from high school, and maybe that's why I was more into that kind of a film." It's no different than a songwriter gauging where they were at in their life when they wrote a song. But it's all artistic; there's not a single sort of corporate kind of audience point of view looking at any of the stuff we do -- at least within the walls of Pixar.

IGN: One of the things you changed about animated movies with Finding Nemo was eliminating that ubiquitous "theme song." Is that something you did consciously, and is it something you prefer to continue with on Wall-E and future films?

Stanton: It's also a bit of a reflection of where we're at in the times. We're fans of movies just as much as anybody else, so if it annoys other people because you're seeing it too much, then it annoys us too. We might not want to do or see that kind of thing. We were very receptive to not wanting to do musical numbers or have characters break out into song, but that's been gone for so long that who knows? Maybe tomorrow we'll come out with a musical. I think we're more up for just the challenge of feeling like something is fresh and we haven't seen it before, because that's the reason anybody goes to the movies. It's really that simple drive that makes us decide what we want to do and how we're going to make it, so we may contradict ourselves all over the place, but the one thing we hopefully will always be consistent about is that we are trying to be fresh, trying to be original, and that first and foremost that the movie is good -- that it's worth the price of admission, and you forget where you were for two hours. That pretty much drives all choices, so if our choices contradict each other outside of that, it's just randomness.

IGN: How much of the voice cast in Wall-E was driven by Ben Burtt, the sound designer, as opposed to recruiting familiar names and faces?

Stanton: I think if you look back at the last couple of movies we don't go for names just for names' sake. It's pretty random if we happen to catch somebody that's on the up; even Tom Hanks and Tim Allen weren't as big in '92 as how they became by '95 -- even that was chance. So we just found that the only way to guarantee that the movie was going to be good was that you get the best voice cast for that character, so that when you watch them you're not going, "Oh, that's Jim Carrey." You want to go that's the character. It's great if it's somebody famous and can help the marketing of the movie, but that's never going to drive why we choose the [talent].

IGN: Technology has allowed us to achieve levels of photorealism where you can literally do anything. But how important is that really in the service of telling a compelling story?

Stanton: Well, I think in a weird way, it's the other way around. I think in the last 15 years I've watched us and other companies just wait to see -- like if you can put these ideas in holding patterns waiting for the technology to get just a little better at certain things, if they can solve "X" this story is going to be perfect. I think more stories are opening up now that certainly you could have done earlier, but now the technology can support what you've seen in your head almost on anything. So I think it's a great time to make movies because now it just becomes how smart are you at which colors to choose to paint with.

IGN: How does that translate to what you do, particularly now that we're moving more and more towards high-definition presentation in theaters and on DVD?

Stanton: It's exciting, but at the same time it takes every person on board to get these movies made. But Blu-ray has what, twice the content or something like that? Where are we going to come up with stuff? So it's exciting on one end I think more as a consumer than it is as a content provider. I just get tired when I think about how much stuff I've got to throw on [the DVD], but it is exciting. But the cool thing is that we've had the luxury to see our stuff with the best-looking quality ever in sound and visuals from day one, and now the outside world has finally caught up. They can see these movies as good as they've always looked internally; you can see Toy Story now better than you ever could in the theater when it came out, and that's the way we always saw it when we were in our own building. So it's kind of nice in that sense.

IGN: More than ever, animation is recognized as a medium rather than a genre, as it was for many years. How much interest if any do you have in moving between live-action and animation filmmaking, as Andrew Adamson did with Shrek and then the Narnia movies?

Stanton: I think if you go back to any interviews [I've done] I've always been idea-driven, and I knew someday there would be ideas that would not be perfect for just a 100 percent CG world, and what's nice to see is the palette is growing more and there are more choices for how you can generate these images. So that's exciting, and I'll always be open to doing whatever it takes to make whatever the current idea of the day feel as believable and engrossing as the movies I've so far gotten to work on. That's the drug I've sort of gotten addicted to is being able to fully realize exactly what I pictured, and you don't want to go backwards from that. So I'm sure live-action hybrids and how that keeps getting defined will start being added into the canon of what I do or even Pixar does just because we're not going to let anything stop us from getting that story [told]. We are very story addicted.

IGN: How much work do you have left to do on Wall-E?

Stanton: Gosh, it's full board between now and probably May of next year, so I have no life between now and May. I'm getting into the "no life" phase of everything now.

IGN: You said at the panel this film was more or less envisioned while you were procrastinating on Finding Nemo. Was this one consuming enough, or were you able to come up with an idea for your next film while finishing Wall-E?

Stanton: My producers are smirking [laughs]. I am procrastinating on this picture, but I can't say.

[MacGuffin]

Some WALL•E Cast Announced!

According to Box Office MoJo the long rumored Fred Willard, and Jeff Garlin will provide voices in WALL•E!

Fred Willard is said to be the voice of the President of Buy N Large.

[MacGuffin]

[bonanzataz]

where the fuck is the ad for GAR•E?

[Ravi]

Or RAV•E?

[Stefen]

Or Stefen•E

[72teeth]

or 72t•E•th

[Pubrick]

P•