Writer-director Andrew Stanton drew from a multitude of sources to fashion his latest Pixar masterpiece WALL-E.
By Pam Grady, FilmStew.com
Directly in front of Pixar's Emeryville, CA. headquarters are two playful statues that pay homage to the animation studio's earliest days: the cheeky little lamp and ball that were the stars of John Lasseter's two-minute 1986 cartoon Luxo Jr., which was nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar. And as writer-director Andrew Stanton recently revealed to FilmStew on a field trip to Pixar HQ, without Luxo Jr., Stanton's new feature WALL-E might not exist.
"I was so taken with Luxo Jr., which [John Lasseter made] before I ever came to work at Pixar," Stanton explains. "It has such power to it. You saw so much character in this appliance. You saw it as an appliance first and as a character second. I really felt there was a lot of power to that."
"I think there's a different thing we pull from ourselves emotionally when we see a pet or we see an infant, because it's so cute and it's trying to express itself, but it can't explain itself," he adds. "You want to finish the sentence, 'I think it's sad, I think it's hungry, I think it likes me.' That's pretty powerful stuff when you start throwing your emotional history into it. And I felt that if you could make a main character that does that for a whole film, that could be really emotionally powerful and that was really a big drive."
The most ambitious Pixar movie to date combines that desire to animate the inanimate with Stanton's love of the great sci-fi movies of the late 1960's, 1970's and early 1980's, as he cites specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Blade Runner, Outland and the first two Star Trek feature films.
Stanton admits that the nearly silent movie has dire underpinnings. All humans, animals and plant life on Earth has apparently disappeared. All that is left are crumbling structures, mounds of garbage, and ghostly ads for the Buy 'N' Large corporation. But the filmmaker, who won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature for Finding Nemo and received Best Screenplay nominations for co-writing that fish tale and Toy Story, believes that his main character more than balances out the equation.
"WALL-E is such a bright light," he says. "He is such a charming character, and he was charming from the minute we started drawing him, let alone start animating him. I knew he would be this light in the middle of all this darkness, so I wasn't afraid to go there. It's sci-fi and sci-fi doesn't deal with happy villages with pretty flower people singing in it. That's not what sci-fi is, so I wanted to be true to the genre."
When Stanton began thinking about WALL-E, the only things he was certain of were that his hero was the last working robot on earth and that he wanted to tell a love story. From there came the idea to somehow weave in some musical standard or other.
He envisioned layering "old-fashioned" music over stars, the past meeting the future, as a way to start the movie. That inspiration led to the happy accident of including two songs from the movie musical Hello, Dolly!. "I started trolling through standards, and standards, a lot of them, come from musicals," he observes. "I did enough musical theater to know certain musicals to go through, and as I got to Hello, Dolly! and I played "Put on Your Sunday Clothes," and that 'out there' phrase came just from a completely aesthetical, visceral response, I went, 'That is cool!' And then I couldn't justify why I had the rest of it, but it just kept working for me and I kept coming back to it."
"I said, 'This is the oddest idea I've ever had. I don't know why, and then I realized, 'You know what? This song is probably working, because it's so blatantly naïve and it's about two guys that are sheltered in their little small town that they just want to steal away for one night in the big city and experience real life and kiss a girl.' And then I thought, that's WALL-E, that's exactly his story, so then I just thought, 'That really works.'"
"So I started to explore that," Stanton continues. "Then I thought, 'How would he discover that? Well, he could come across the movie of it.' So I started looking at the movie and I came across "It Only Takes a Moment," and when I saw the two lovers hold hands, it was like a light bulb going off. I said, 'That's exactly how I could have WALL-E express I love you, because he can't say that.' And when you get that much information back from doing your research, you kind of take it as fate."
Overall, the 42-year-old Boston native had one directive for his production designer Ralph Eggleston and his directors of photography Jeremy Lasky and Danielle Feinberg. Namely that they wanted it to feel like WALL-E was a 1970's film that had been unearthed in a can and lovingly restored.
With that in mind, he consulted with seven-time Academy Award nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins, who is credited as a visual consultant on WALL-E. "That was to give a more realistic feel with a camera because my whole thing was how much can I make you believe that box is really sitting there in the sand in the dusty air?" he says. "Because the more real you think it is, the more charming it's going to be when it comes to life. So I knew how the camera worked, how the lenses worked, how the things were lit. Every other aspect of the filmmaking had to support trying to put you in that space."
Fight Club and Zodiac director David Fincher also gets special thanks in WALL-E's credits for furthering Stanton's visual inspiration. "It was his DP Harry Savides who did a lot of Gus van Sant movies that I was looking at the time," Stanton relates. "And I loved how he used the camera for shallow focus on the stuff. He made this sort of intimacy with the camera -- even in these sort of urban blight settings."
"I thought, 'That's perfect, 'cause I'm in a world where it's dystopian, and you've got these two metal boxes who fall in love. Where am I going to get the intimacy? I'll do it with the camera,'" he adds. "So I wanted to sort of talk to Harry Savides about that."
All this hard work has paid off, as WALL-E is a visual stunner, particularly in the scenes set in that crumbling, deserted earth landscape. The storytelling is equally as resonant, funny and moving, far more mature than typical family fare and yet pitched so that even little kids can understand it. That is no accident either.
"We're moviegoers first and filmmakers second," Stanton says of himself and the entire Pixar family. "We're the biggest movie geeks. We love movies. We know what a great movie feels like when you see it. We know how rare it is. And that's the brass ring we're just always trying to grab for."
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