WALL• E

[MacGuffin]

Wall•E Preview

An invitation to Pixar Animation Studios is a little like being asked to sit at the cool kid's table at the high school cafeteria. Everyone wants to go, but only a lucky few actually do (with that list changing several times throughout the year). So, of course, it was a no-brainer when IGN was asked to visit the facility back in February (as part of our WonderCon weekend coverage) to preview 40 minutes of the studio's next production, Wall•E, and interview the film's director, Andrew Stanton.

First off came the requisite tour of the Emeryville, Calif. campus. This marked the second time this reporter had been personally escorted through the hallowed facility, yet it still managed to amaze. Sure, the buildings were state-of-the-art. Sure, office décor resembled that of a fanboy's wet dream (a personal fave was the tiki themed office deep in the heart of the art department). Sure, there were more cool things you'd love to see hanging on your wall than found in some of the greatest museums in the world. But it was the creative energy and pure, unadulterated happiness pouring down the hallways that truly made a lasting impression. These were people who not only took pride in what they did, but — perhaps more importantly — actually loved what they did. A rare quality in today's professional workforce.

The tour ended at the facility's screening room where the attending press was treated to the first 40 minutes of the still in-production film. And what unspooled in that darkened theater was a true throw back to Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2 glory days.

Spoiler: ShowHide

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.

[MacGuffin]

Guess Who's A Voice In WALL-E?
Source: SciFi Wire

Jim Morris, producer of Disney/Pixar's upcoming animated film WALL•E, unveiled new footage from the movie to fans at New York Comic Con over the weekend, offering the first glimpse at the character M-O and revealing that Alien star Sigourney Weaver will voice a role.

Weaver will voice the computer of the starship Axiom. "We kind of geeked out at the thought of having a little wink to Alien," Morris said in a panel. "Instead of fighting Mother, Sigourney has become Mother."

New footage showed the character of M-O, an anal-retentive cleaning droid. In the clip, WALL•E, a cube-shaped robot, sneaks aboard the Axiom, one of the luxury liners that has transported the human race off the planet Earth. WALL•E takes offense at M-O's attempts to clean him.

All told, Morris showed four clips from the movie to the Comic Con audience. The first was an extended version of a scene originally screened at last summer's Comic-Con International, in which WALL•E meets his robotic romantic interest, EVE.

A second clip showed WALL•E rescuing EVE from a sandstorm by taking her to his trailer home, where he shows off his collection of oddities: an egg beater, a Rubik's Cube, bubble wrap and a Betamax copy of the musical film Hello Dolly.

In the final footage, EVE places WALL•E in an escape pod. While inside, the Weaver-voiced computer informs him that his pod has accidentally been programmed to self-destruct. WALL•E opens June 27.

[MacGuffin]

[Redlum]

http://gizmodo.com/386884/wall+e-robot-toy-in-action

This reminds me of how much I wanted/want one of those toy Johnny 5 robots that Fisher Stevens sold in Short Circuit 2.

I can't believe I have to wait 5 more weeks, for this little guy.

[MacGuffin]

Pixar Gambles on a Robot in Love
By KATRINA ONSTAD; New York Times

HE is rusty, lipless, sub-literate and keeps company with garbage. Worse, he's a "Hello, Dolly!" fan. This little robot, who goes by the name Wall-E — for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — is also the newest face (not that he has one) of Pixar.

Last year's offering, "Ratatouille," about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with "Wall-E," a $180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin.

Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn't care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not when the movie comes out on Friday. "I never think about the audience," he said. "If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away."

Mr. Stanton, 42, sat in a Toronto hotel room this month, shaggy-haired and bearded, bouncing in his chair with a tween's frenzied energy. In this way he seemed to embody the anti-corporate posture that is part of the Pixar mythology. When John Lasseter, Pixar's chief creative executive, announced the company's $7.4 billion acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he did so in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Employees at the Pixar "campus" in Emeryville, Calif., ride scooters and play foosball. "It's like a film school with no teachers," Mr. Stanton said. "Everyone actually wants you to take risks."

Such is the Pixar brand, or anti-brand: a multibillion dollar company that acts like a nerd hobbyist in a basement. But that balancing act is even tougher to pull off as a subsidiary of Disney, a company whose very name has been turned into a neologism — Disneyfication — for a kind of bland commercial aesthetic.

Perhaps to assure the public that nothing has changed under new ownership, an early trailer for "Wall-E" plays up Pixar's carefree mystique. The teaser, narrated by Mr. Stanton, describes a 1994 lunch, when the central Pixar players were finishing "Toy Story," the first feature-length CG animated film. Over lunch they sketched on napkins characters that would end up in "A Bug's Life," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo."

On one napkin a lonely robot emerged. "We said: 'What if humanity left and some little robot got left on and kept doing the same thing forever?' " said Mr. Stanton, who joined Pixar in 1990 as its second animator and ninth employee. "That was the saddest character I'd ever heard of."

"Wall-E" took a back seat to another project, a film Mr. Stanton wrote and directed about a fish father looking for his son: "Finding Nemo" (2003). It went on to earn $340 million domestically and $865 million worldwide. The day after the 2004 Academy Awards, in which Mr. Stanton won the Oscar for best animated feature, he went to work on "Wall-E," forgoing a planned six-month vacation.

"We were always frustrated that people saw CG as a genre as opposed to just a medium that could tell any kind of story," he said. "We felt like we widened the palette with 'Toy Story,' but then people unconsciously put CG back in a different box: 'Well, it's got to be irreverent, it's got to have A-list actors, it's got to have talking animals.' "

So Mr. Stanton took "Wall-E" to a more somber, less sassy place (though there is some sass of course). The film is set in 2700 on an uninhabitable Earth, a dystopia covered in towers of garbage. Mr. Stanton drew on films from science fiction's golden age: "1968 to '81," he said, with a film geek's specificity. Software imitated the film — mostly Panavision 70 millimeter — that gave movies like "2001" and "Blade Runner" their visual sweep. Casting Sigourney Weaver in one of a handful of speaking parts is a nod to "Alien."

Wall-E, a generic robo-janitor, contentedly compacts trash into perfect cubes, until he's shaken up by the appearance of an egg-shaped search robot named Eve. This high-tech, piano-key-smooth egg-bot has dropped from the sky, seeking a sign of life on Earth. Wall-E, who knows about love from a video of "Hello, Dolly!," falls hard.

"Technically there have been romances in animation," Mr. Stanton said, but does anyone care about them? Mr. Stanton loves a rhetorical question: "Why can't you have a love story that just completely sweeps you up? It happens in other movies, why not animation?"

In "Wall-E," a mega-corporation called Buy n' Large has transported Earth's populace to luxury space ships, where the obese human race moves around in robotic loungers, drinking super-size soft drinks, placated by television and robot servants. Environmental disaster; corporate takeover; a global psychological coma: "Wall-E" starts to seem like "An Inconvenient Cartoon." Yet Mr. Stanton dismisses talk of an allegory.

"I was writing this thing so long ago, how could I have known what's going on now?" he said. "As it was getting finished, the environment talk started to freak me out. I don't have much of a political bent, and the last thing I want to do is preach. I just went with things that I felt were logical for a possible future and supported the point of my story, which was the premise that irrational love defeats life's programming, and that the most robotic beings I've met are us."

And is the ubiquitous, all-powerful Buy n' Large a sly dig at Disney Pixar's new corporate bedfellow? With a fervent head shake no, Mr. Stanton turns company man.

"Part of the contract was: 'You can't touch us, you can't change what we do,' and that's actually gained them such a level of respect and trust they wouldn't have gotten if they'd tried to be Draconian."

David A. Price, author of a company history called "The Pixar Touch," doesn't see the dark tone of "Wall-E" as a radical departure. "Pixar films reach whole audiences because they know how to make characters that are appealing to children and then give them adult problems," he said.

Both Nemo and Wall-E are small, lost and vulnerable. But unlike "Finding Nemo," with its chatterbox characters, "Wall-E" feels almost like a silent film. The first 25 to 30 minutes introduce Wall-E as a Buster Keaton-meets-E.T. figure, comically rocking and shuffling. Mr. Stanton found the key to the robot's infant-sweet appearance at a baseball game. While he played with binoculars, Wall-E sprang into his head: binoculars on a box with treads.

"I want you to project a face on it," he said. "I wanted to evoke the audience's participation. You need to actually see it as a machine. I kept saying, I'm trying to make 'R2D2: The Movie.' "

To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the "Star Wars" robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script — "Hi, I'm Wall-E" — and Mr. Burtt essentially translated the dialogue into robot, something he calls "audio puppeteering."

"If you take sounds from the real world, we have a subconscious association with them that gives credibility to an otherwise fantastic concept," Mr. Burtt said in a telephone interview.

The result is a film where the sound is as significant as the visual. One hears echoes of E.T.'s throat-singing ("E.T" is another Burtt film), and when Wall-E moves, the sound comes from a hand-cranked, World War II Army generator that Mr. Burtt saw in a John Wayne movie, then found on eBay.

"We all thought about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton," Mr. Burtt said, "this energetic, sympathetic character who doesn't say a whole lot. Most animation is very dialogue heavy. There's dance, constant talking, punch lines. We used to wonder: How will we prepare the audience?"

Whether or not viewers give in to "Wall-E" is a billion-dollar question. "The box office from Pixar films hasn't been growing since 'Finding Nemo,' " Mr. Price said, speaking of the domestic box office. "Certainly 'Cars' and 'Ratatouille' were not as strong as the predecessor films." (Even "The Incredibles," the best performer since "Finding Nemo," trailed it in the United States.) "If that trend were to continue with 'Wall-E,' there would be questions raised about the soundness of the deal. Though of course there's always money to be made in merchandising." The "Wall-E" robots, sheets and Crocs may turn a profit, but the alpha success still has to be the film about a mute robot.

But Mr. Stanton is measuring the film's success in different terms.

"I'm not naïve about what's at stake," he said. "But I almost feel like it's an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure. I don't want to paint the same painting again. I don't want to make the same sculpture again. Why shouldn't a big movie studio be able to make those small independent kinds of pictures? Why not change it up?"

[Stefen]

Cancel moviemaking.

This shits over. 

[Bethie]

those eyes. love him.



hal.

[samsong]

wall-e the character is the most endearing pixar creation (robot chaplin) since the cute-overkill one-two of boo and sully.  wall-e the movie is good, if a little familiar.  the theater i saw it at managed to digitally project an animated film out of focus but it's glorious to behold.  glad this doesn't deviate from the "every scifi film made from here on out must reference 2001" rule, ambivalent about its green-ness and heavy hand, i heart fred willard.  thoroughly enjoyable.

[MacGuffin]

While I was very happy to see Stanton helming this project, Nemo is still my favorite Pixar film, although this will get a spot in my top ten. WALL•E doesn't completely have that sense of adventure and fun as that one had, probably because it gets a bit bogged down by it's "message." But what it does have going for it are two robots in love. When those two are on screen the film is magic. There is more romance between these two than any romantic comedy I can remember in recent releases. And MO gets my vote for Supporting Actor. As usual for Pixar, the animation is amazing (just witness WALL•E's ascent into space).

[The Ultimate Badass]

Hi, I'm new here.

SPOILERS!

The first 20-30 minutes of this movie are innovative and different, even experimental in ways--I loved it. But, once the doughy human characters hit the screen and the semi-preachy plot kicks in, it quickly becomes clear that this movie has resigned itself to be just another well made Pixar family movie. Which is fine. Just wish they were a little braver here.

[Ravi]

Ultimate Badass, I found Wall-E was incredibly daring.  Hardly any dialogue in the first half, and even in the second half the dialogue is sparse.  The robots have personalities, but they don't talk like humans.  Its more like they have a rudimentary bank of words that are called up when appropriate.  If this film had been made by any other studio, Wall-E and Eve would have been voiced by big celebrities, and the cockroach would have been a sassy sidekick.  The plot might have been semi-preachy in the second half, but how else could you do a story in which Earth is one giant landfill?  The film takes the viewpoint of Wall-E, who compacts that endless pile of trash with cheerful efficiency, and even the plot about the plant is done from the perspective of the love story.

Did anyone notice the subtle Mac/PC thing going on with Eve and Wall-E?

[picolas]

i want to see it again right now. i think my only criticism is the ending. maybe i'll elaborate later. i need to go to bed. but yeah. probably the best pixar movie. i don't consider the second half pereeeeaachE at all.

[Stefen]

It's the best movie ever made.

If this forum wasn't so dead, this thread would be a billion pages long, then get moved to the Kubrick sub-forum where it belongs.

[Sleepless]

Awesome. Loved it. Definitely one my top 2 movies of the year so far. I didn't see this as a message movie - it's pure fantasy - a what if? Although of course there were some very intelligent ideas about the reliance people have on technology. He says as he's addicted to xixax. I loved Wall-E and Eve. And the little cockroach. And just about every other robot in this movie. This should have been a three hour movie like Tarkovsky's Solaris.

[matt35mm]

You know what?

(sigh)

This is really, really good.  I realized that the most other spectacle movies can get out of me is a "Ha, neat!" such that what I used to think was awe and wonderment was just "Ha, neat!" compared to some of the moments in this movie.  There were a couple of moments where I was close to tears in awe (when Wall•E first leaves Earth, and when Wall•E and Eve dance in space).

As of right now, I'm at a loss for what to do other than tip my hat and be baffled at how Pixar does this stuff.  It is truly masterful in so many ways--not only in the sophisticated technology, but also in knowing how to get things across with simplicity.  What other movies can so fully express characters who have no mouth, barely a face, and little dialogue?  Or make us feel for a cockroach--one of the most loathed creatures on Earth--without making the cockroach cute?  For the creators to trust that we will come to know who the cockroach is simply judging by how the cockroach chooses to follow Wall•E is one of the many examples of how the filmmakers knew when to keep it simple, and when to make it big.

I also loved Jeff Garlin and Fred Willard.  AMAZING!