Xixax Film Forum

incongruously, with the jaunty strains of the song "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" from the 1969 musical film Hello Dolly: "Out there/There's a world outside of Yonkers ... "

The camera swoops down from outer space, over a smog-shrouded city, between immense buildings. Which turn out not to be buildings, but tottering towers of garbage lining abandoned, wind-blown streets through which motors a tiny machine. It's WALL•E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. A careworn, cube-shaped machine with tiny treads for feet and oversized binoculars for eyes, WALL•E goes about his day as he has for seven centuries: compacting trash into tidy cubes, collecting the odd bit of flotsam for his collection of oddities, trying not to run over his cockroach companion and oblivious to the decaying city around him, listening to the ancient music that plays from his memory banks. " ... Put on your Sunday clothes, there's lots of world out there ... "

In the background, we get a hint about the backstory of this wasted world, from which a consumerist, overinduldged human race eventually fled to the stars, leaving machines to clean up their mess. That includes video billboards featuring Fred Willard as the chief executive of the Buy n Large corporation, a super-retailing conglomerate whose vestiges litter the world of the future. (The video of Willard was shot as live action, a Pixar first.)

Undaunted, WALL•E has carved out a comfortable life. But he longs for something more: Watching an ancient video of Hello Dolly, in which an impossibly beautiful man and woman touch hands, WALL•E clasps his own fingers together and sighs.

its first film featuring live-action mixed with animation

First the potential flaws: The premise of the movie is that Earth was so overrun with rampant commercialism and therefore garbage from all those purchases, that the inhabitants had to flee Earth. The population left in Starship (The Axiom) to wait out the cleanup efforts by the robots left behind. Even the cleanup robots fall into disrepair and WALL•E is the last one left, doing what he his programmed to do.

I'm not sure how the moviegoing public will react to such in-your-face preaching about the dangers of Wal-Mart and Costco. Nor the hints at weather run amok, like the hyper-dust storms that whip up out of nowhere to savage the city where WALL•E lives.

Also, within the Axiom – the logical conclusion of life without the need for physical movement is life as a couch potato – "slugs" plugged into their own personal Xbox/PlayStation.

Sci-Fi movies have preached before -- Planet of the Apes; Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Soylent Green -- and still they entertain. So WALL•E is just following along in a rich tradition. The question is will the love story between WALL•E and EVE stand above the distractions or be dragged down with the weight of them?

So, on to the positives: WALL•E himself has much more life and responsiveness than I originally expected. The Pixar animators have done a tremendous job of bringing Andrew Stanton's vision to life while still keeping within the basic premise of a working robot. While his emotional range is limited to his robotic abilities/movement, that does not really limit his emotional range. EVE actually is more limited than WALL•E because she has just her eyes for her emotional states.

The movie does a good job of setting up the film and WALL•E's daily routine. It also takes the time to explain the background of Earth's state through vignettes as WALL•E scoots around the city. Video billboards, newspaper articles, etc. fill in the story line in a well-constructed way that plays with you. Daring you to do two things at once - scanning the background for more clues and watching WALL•E live his life.

WALL•E himself is charming because of his childlike look at the world. It's a kid's playground with quite literally tons of stuff to inspect, explore and play with. He's the ultimate child collector, inspecting, organizing and cataloging everything he finds interesting.

The budding relationship between WALL•E and EVE is key for the rest of the film. Everything else that happens later hinges on your acceptance of WALL•E's and EVE's "feelings" for each other. I think it works. WALL•E is the earnest geeky suitor with limited social skills. EVE is the aloof, sexy (think iMac on estrogen) counterpart that comes to find WALL•E endearing and lovable.

We finished up with a Q/A sessions with Andrew Stanton. You can listen to the full interview here (don't mind the odd sound coming from somebody else's recorder several times).

The most interesting part of the interview was Andrew's discussion about how they worked to get the same camera angle and lens focus techniques from the old Sci-Fi movies into WALL•E. They actually brought in a cinematographer (Dennis Muren), constructed small scale sets, and had him conduct classes for the animators and programmers.

This attention to the camera really shows up in the visuals of the movie. Before Pixar used to mention the special effects boundaries they were pushing, "the feel of under water" or "animated hair" - in WALL•E the boundaries are not being pushed they are being reclaimed; harkening back to the Sci-Fi movies of yesterday, with the camera angles, lens flares, and odd focal lengths.

In the first few moments of the film, audiences are introduced to a deserted planet awash in litter. Billboards, newspapers and still playing holographic commercials (shown in live-action — a Pixar first) tell of a world with a serious waste management problem. In an effort to help, the Buy N Large corporation created a fleet of robots known as Wall•E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) to sweep up the garbage, compress it into small cubes and then stack it neatly for waste disposal before moving on to the next clean up area. But this effort was too little, too late. The inhabitants of what is revealed to be Earth were forced to abandon the planet and head to the stars for a fresh start. Unfortunately, they forgot to turn off the last operating robot.

Day in and day out, Wall•E goes about "his" pre-programmed routine. In the process, he collects random items that he then takes back to his home base — remnants of a long-lost society. His only friend is — what else — a cockroach who comes frighteningly close to getting accidentally run over time and again. But where audiences truly relate to Wall•E is in his downtime, when the robot is back at his home, surrounded by human "stuff" and watching musical numbers from Hello Dolly! The hero is truly alone.

Enter Eve: the slick, highly advanced, flying robot that is dropped off by a rocket ship to search for plant life. And what starts out as a somewhat rocky relationship quickly turns into a love affair — Wall•E is truly smitten. But when Eve accomplishes her mission, the spacecraft returns to claim her. Of course, our hero is not willing to let her go that easily, stowing aboard the ship and embarking on a new adventure.

Up came the lights and in walked Wall•E director, Stanton. His excitement at screening the footage for the first time was truly evident, as was his sincere interest in hearing feedback. Likewise, he was very open when it came time to answer questions, addressing such issues as the film's lack of traditional dialogue in all of Act One (robot beeps and background conversations in various video clips tackle this), Luxo (Pixar's animated lamp mascot) serving as his initial spark of inspiration and his emasculating love of old-time musicals.

Q: Was the intention to make Eve look like an Apple product?

Andrew Stanton: We were certainly influenced by the design. The biggest thing was, what's the sexiest other end of the spectrum. We kept saying Wall•E is a tractor and she's a Mercedes. So [in] the world of technology, what's the sleekest, most seamless, where the moving parts are hidden? So we sort of riffed off of anything of that ilk. Although after we had her designed, we had Johnny Iams — who does all of the design at Apple — we invited him over and he was very seduced by it. Who knows if a weird chicken and egg thing will happen [laughs] based on that. He approved highly.

Q: What kind of reaction were you getting from the studio seeing how there is no dialogue because in the first 30 minutes of the film?

Stanton: First of all, I think that's a misnomer. There is dialog all through it. All I am saying is that they are not necessarily saying words in a language that you know. What I wanted was integrity. It all comes down to... just as much as I believe that Luxo is a lamp and that it has a life in it and it thinks like a lamp and acts like a lamp and I don't have to be told that. It doesn't have to be spelled out to me; I just get it right away. I wanted the same thing with the robots. I wanted you to believe that that's a machine and it's been there for hundreds of years, it's been weathered, and it has a thought process on its own. It was designed a certain way so therefore it would have a certain way that it spoke electronically. And Eve was designed a certain way and would speak a certain way electronically. I just wanted things to be sort of logic based and it was all to service the integrity of the world because I just want to believe that I am there. I want to believe it's really happening. So that shows the look of the film, the lens choice, some of the technological advances we made so that you'll get more of a sense of the three dimensional atmosphere. Anything we did was just to enhance the experience of believability.

Q: You're clearly playing on sort of the cues in the film that trigger people's collective memory of what it is to be a robot in outer space, with the spaceships and stuff. I may be wrong, but it seemed like there was some R2 D2 in Wall•E.

Stanton: We certainly make blatant homages every once in a while. You try and make everything as original as you can make it, but everything probably comes from the collective unconscious and things that influenced you, like anything else. It's all subconsciously quite incestuous.

Q: Were there conscious things that you were going for?

Stanton: No. Everything tends to be just an accident. I have had a million things in other movies that I have worked on and people will go, "You know, that's just like this." And you go, "Oh, really?" [Laughs] I want everything to come from a sincere place, from a truthful place. Whether that ends up being a choice that seven other films made, I don't care, as long as that choice came for the right reasons.

Q: The retrieving of live vegetation reminded me of Huey, Dewey and Louie from Silent Running.

Stanton: You know, all of those '70s films... Huey, Dewey and Louie, definitely from the perspective of imbuing a personality on a machine, that affected me big when I was a kid. Almost in the same way that Red Balloon did in terms of imbuing something on the red balloon. It's all from that same family. It's a very small pool to pull from, if you think cinematically, how often that's been done. Then you cull that down to how often that's been done in sci-fi; it's a small pool.

Q: Children don't need to be talked down to...

Stanton: I argue that kids are smarter than you think. Kids are wired up for the first 10 to 15 years of their life to figure everything out. So, they're watching you all the time. They maybe don't understand what you and mom just talked about, but they're trying to glean anything out of the inflection, out of the timing, out of when it's happening, what peoples' faces look like... They're way more receptive to translate than our jaded adult selves.

Q: You said you got the idea for Finding Nemo from your own child. Was there something from your life that gave rise to this idea?

Stanton: No, like I said, things came from different places for different movies, and this one just honestly was coming up with a situation of a robot left alone on a sort of Robinson Crusoe kind of situation, and that just evolved a ton. And the funny thing is that immediately, almost in the next sentence, I remember Pete Docter and I continued to talk about it after our lunch, without even any debate, we said, "Oh, you'd never want to have it speak. You'd want it be a real robot. You'd want it to have to speak with how it was built." That's the excitement about it.

Q: Where did the use of live-action come from?

Stanton: To be honest, it just came out of a logistical conceit that I knew I wanted to use footage from a musical, from a live-action movie. I felt I had the luxury of evolution on my side that we made up for the future for humans, so that we don't have to worry about matching. But any retro footage, I just felt you wouldn't be in the same world if you didn't... since we knew we were going to use footage from Hello Dolly!

Q: Was it always Hello Dolly!?

Stanton: I know this is the question I know I'm gonna get asked for the rest of my life is, "Why Hello Dolly!?" And the one thing I wanted to spill is I'm a fan of the movie. I just like to think that Wall•E has bad taste in musicals. But he's a romantic at heart, you know, he's not that discerning. You know, every once in a while you do change something because somebody got there first. It was frustrating to be in the same year as Triplets of Belleville because I loved that film when Finding Nemo came out. And I was already working on Wall•E. and Wall•E originally had a French '30s swing music at the beginning, and I just loved the juxtaposition of that — the old and the new — I hadn't seen that. And then I saw Triplets of Belleville, which had French swing music over not a lot of speaking, and the last thing I wanted to be accused of was stealing from something. And it wasn't hard fast and set in stone that it had to be that piece of music, so I started opening my mind to other old-fashioned things. And to be honest, the story wasn't fully complete at the time — just sort of parts of the story were. I had been in Hello Dolly! the musical and a lot of other musicals growing up in high school, and for some ironic reason — I don't know if you guys do this, I troll iTunes every once in a while because it has become Tower and you can't go to Tower anymore — and I remember stumbling through and going, "I remember this," and trying to remember the songs. I remember immediately going, "This is the most bizarre idea I've ever had, but it just might work." And I juxtaposed it against the opening, and it worked. It led to me figuring out more about what other songs were in the movie and stuff, and it really opened doors for me... put other arrows in the quiver for how to tell the story without having to rely on dialogue, without giving plot away.

Q: There is a part where Eve is flying through the air, freed from the ship. It was interesting and suggested that he feels a connection to her.

Stanton: Yeah, there's like an inkling of however he evolved... there's something in there for her for him to be attracted to. And also, frankly, she just needs to be there, I mean he's never seen another robot. It's impossible not to immediately make a very primal analogy to "love at first sight," and being able to use the sci-fi means at hands to express that. That's really all it was. That's pretty much been the road map for the whole movie.

Q: It looks very distinctive and feels very real. What was your guiding principle in coming up with the look of the film?

Stanton: That's the bane of these kinds of movies. First of all, just a CG movie, you get nothing for free. If you see it in there, somebody had to plan it, somebody had to draw it, somebody had to paint it, somebody had to model it, or matte paint it or something. Nothing came by accident. Nobody was able to go to a thrift store, a prop shop, take a photo outside... So that's just overwhelming. It's daunting. You add on top of that a fantasy world where there are no rules and you get to make up what you think the future looks like. You almost want to give up right away because it's just too many decisions to make. So you surround yourself with really talented people that have really strong opinions about how they like things to look, and you just start chipping away a day at a time until it doesn't seem so overwhelming. It's like that on every movie, but I gotta say, this movie and Monsters, Inc. were probably the most burdensome on the art department historically here just because of the fantasy world aspect. There's just that much more to have to come up with. You can't just go, "Oh, it's a dentist's office." So the end result is very satisfying, but to get there is truly daunting.

Q: Was there a guiding principle or was it for whatever worked with the story?

Stanton: You know, if there was, I knew that I had to tell the story with the Earth. I had to tell a lot of history. I had to tell what's happened over 1,000 years. That almost dictated what everything was. You wanted a city that felt sort of like... sort of what Shanghai's starting to feel like now, or Dubai. And then you had to have trash towers that were amongst that. Because you're telling a history that you haven't seen yet, and now you're also telling the demise of that history, and then the way to try to solve the problem of that past history, and now the sort of dystopian result of that, so it's so layered. It was a real brain-tease. Every shot counted. It was thrilling to solve it because every part of the buffalo is used on that. But that's really what drove everything — just telling the story of that. But then we knew again we wanted the future to be cool. We all are probably very similar because of our backgrounds here, that we all miss the Tomorrowland that was promised us from Tomorrowland of the heyday of Disneyland, and that really said, "Well, that's the future I want to have seen us get to." You see it now. It's like, this may be adding more burden to my life, but it's so cool I can't resist. It's the seduction factor. It's too convenient, it's too cool, it's too whatever. And to me, all of Tomorrowland at Disneyland in the late '50s and '60s design was like that, anything they promised of that look was so... I'd say, "Yes, give it to me!" We turned it into the phrase of: "I just want it to have that 'where's my jetpack?' feel." So "Where's my jetpack?" became sort of the touchstone of any art direction for anything that was truly trying to tack on to the futuristic design of stuff.

Q: One of your colleagues here [at Pixar] said that in five years we won't be able to tell the difference between live-action and CG.

Stanton: That's a bold statement [laughs].

Q: I think we're seeing an indication here of that though...

Stanton: Well, there isn't a desire to be photo realistic. To make sure that that's not how that's interpreted. But there's a desire to just indulge and believing that you are where you are.

Q: You mentioned at Comic-Con being able to push the virtual camera department. How were you able to capture the looks of... the essence of many of those sci-fi films.

Stanton: You know, we've all been to film school since Toy Story. It's not like we came in as really, really knowledgeable filmmakers. We were too stupid to know we couldn't do it, and so we just kept working on it. We've gotten smarter as we go... we want to keep learning and try to get better at something. And I remember getting to a point at the end of Nemo, I got so seduced by the underwater feel we managed to get with it — this extra dimensional sense — and I said, "Can we do that in the air?" And then with a little more smarts we started to look at what other cameras were doing whenever I watched one of my favorite films, whenever they were racking focus, the barrel distortion, and the little ovals on the lights. And I would notice our stuff wasn't doing that exactly or not at all on some things. Invariably, you would reach some guy who did the programming who would say, "No, the math is all right." And you'd go, "That doesn't answer it for me. I don't care if the math's right. It's not doing what it's supposed to be doing." We actually hired Roger Deakins, the famous cinematographer, to just give us a crash-course on cinematography, and then liked him so much we asked him to stay another week or two. Because what we do is so foreign to how we approach it, we're trying to get the same end result. It happened to coincide with us deciding that we were going to rent actual air-flux 70mm cameras and shoot a stand-in Wall•E, three-dimensional, with the grid on the atrium in here, and do all the things with the camera we wanted to do and expect it to do like lens flare and all that stuff, and then we would make a virtual set of exactly the same thing in our computer, and then compare to prove. And sure enough, they didn't match. That's all our computer engineers needed to see to get challenged and frustrated, and started to fix things. We've been able to now play in a much more accurate grammar of what we've all sort of been unconsciously been used to seeing in a lot of our favorite sci-fi films.

Q: Give us an example of what that does to the image.

Stanton: Well there's a scene where you see Wall•E looking at Eve while she's got the lighter, and all the Christmas lights turn into nice bright transparent circles over one another. That's achieved by a very narrow, shallow lens that blows everything else into a distortion and blur, but the way it does becomes very magical and very romantic. And we weren't getting those kinds of looks when we would rack focus at all. I was looking at a lot of Gus Van Sant movies, particularly things like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting and he likes to direct your eye with focus. There is an air of intimacy that you achieve by using that as part of your storytelling that I want to use. I want to use that in this film because it's such a cold, clinical, mechanical world. Where do I get my intimacy from? How can I get it?

Q: Can you talk a little about the sound design?

Stanton: Yes, Ben Burtt. Because I knew that, again, the dialogue from many characters generated by their own kind of style, I had to spend a lot of time with Ben Burtt just auditioning stuff. I'd talk about a character, show him the drawings, and he'd go off and come up with just a bevy of ideas of what that machine, that robot, that person would sound like. It was this huge buffet and I would sit there and sort of cull it down. Even after that, you would come away from something like 100 sounds that are in this sort of camp. My editor and I would find that as we worked, we would even want to limit the vocabulary down from that. It was sort of this natural process over two years.

Q: The movie suggests that we might not have learned our lesson...

Stanton: Your hunches would be in the right direction. To be honest, for all the grandeur in the backdrop and all the fantastical things that'll continue to happen in the movie, it's a simple love story, and we try to keep it very much small on the massive backdrop.