The Wizards of

“Wall-E”

by Lynn Barker

Just what does it take to make an animated film about the last, lonely little robot on Earth who keeps on working after all the humans are gone? A ton of animators, sound men, storytellers and voice actors! We wanted to know all about how the story idea was born and how Disney and Pixar’s Wall-E got from writer’s head to screen so we chatted with the filmmakers, animators, director, sound experts and an actor or two to get the scoop for you!

Pixar Producer Andrew Stanton has been a key player in bringing Finding Nemo, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, Ratatouille and other blockbuster animated films to the screen. He directs and screenwrites Wall-E so we asked him how do guys like him come up with these story ideas anyway? “Actually”, says Stanton, “there was this lunch we had during Toy Story around ’94 and we were batting around just any idea we could think of to try and come up with what the next movie would be. One of the sentences was ‘Hey, we could do a sci-fi. What if we did the last robot on Earth? Everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it can stop and it keeps doing it forever.’ There wasn’t even a name of the character. We didn’t even know what it would look like. It was just the loneliest scenario I’d ever heard and I just loved it. And I think that’s why it sort of stayed in the ether for so long”. Little Wall-E is a sort of mobile trash compactor and he just keeps on stacking up all the trash left on Earth after humans take off to the stars.

Other films have been made about robots who talk. Most of them look kind of like humans but the Pixar Studios filmmakers wanted to go with robots that look like, well… robots. Andrew explains, “being a sci-fi geek myself going to the movies all my life, I’d come to my own conclusion that there were two camps of how robots have been designed. It’s either the Tin Man which is a human with metal skin or it’s like R2D2 (from Star-Wars). It’s a machine that has a function and it’s designed based on that and you read a character into it. And I was very interested in going with the machine side, because to me that was what was fascinating… bringing a machine to life”.

There are several worthy messages in Wall-E. We should take care of our environment and nurture it. Also, we don’t want to get so lazy or machine-dependant that we do nothing, don’t exercise and end up lying around and weighing too much to be healthy. But, according to the filmmakers, the biggest message in Wall-E is that “love conquers all”. Little work-horse, rundown Wall-E is alone on Earth for at least 700 years! Boy, is he lonely! He’s also been watching an old video that depicts a couple in love holding hands. When Eve, a sleek surveyor/explorer robot comes to Earth looking for plant life, Wall-E falls hard!

According to actor Jeff Garlin who voices the human Captain of a huge luxury liner spacecraft, the “love” message wraps around all the others, “If we were more into love and less into destruction, I think we'd have a lot less problems with conservation. The thing that people love that destroys the world is the obsession with money and not having enough money and not worrying about how you're getting it”. And how can kids, tweens and teens help? “I kinda feel you have to ask yourself every day, ‘how am I contributing?’” It makes sense that we should all be responsible for our contributions to pollution, clutter, greed and other worldly evils. Garlin points out that the humans in the film are large, weak and kinda lazy. “You drink your food and ride around and never walk. When you talk to people, even if they're next to you, you're looking straight ahead (at a screen). That's like the evolution of Blackberries!” Yikes, I think I’ll put the Blackberry down and go out to exercise right now!

Wall-E’s “face” and eyes look like an expressive pair of binoculars. How did Stanton and pals come up with that idea? “I was at a baseball game”, Stanton relates. “Somebody handed me their binoculars. I hadn’t designed Wall-E yet. I knew he had to compact trash so I knew he was going to be a box and he was going to collapse to possibly show that he’s shy and that’s all I had. When I got handed these binoculars, I missed the entire inning. I just turned [them] around and I started staring at it and I started [moving them up and down] making it go sad and then happy and then mad and then sad and I remembered doing that as a kid with my dad’s binoculars and I said, ‘It’s all there’.”

Hey, if you work at Pixar, or are just walking down the hall up there, your voice might end up in a huge movie! This happened to pretty Elissa Knight who ended up as the voice of Eve! Sound genius Ben Burtt (who created the beeps and squeals of famed Star Wars robot R2-D2), voiced Wall-E but, Ben, well, he wasn’t a girl! Andrew explains, “The one thing Ben Burtt couldn’t simulate was a female voice himself. We wanted a very obvious feminine source, fortunately Elissa Knight, was one of our in-house Pixar players. Because we’re in San Francisco and we’re always rewriting our stuff every day, we don’t have access to actors that quickly, so we use people in-house to do stand-in vocal stuff and she had been a stand-in for many movies and was a pretty decent actress. So I called her in to just do all the female stuff. Ben said ‘That is so good. I’m sorry, I’m not going to look for another actress and re-do all this. She’s great.’ We always ask ‘is that the best voice for the character?’ And that’s why we choose who we do.

What about the electronic yet human-sounding voice of Wall-E? We asked Academy Award-winning sound man and character voice designer Ben Burtt how he added so much to the already appealing character just with the sounds he makes. “Wall-E has lots of different motors and squeaks and little clicks of his hands and those are all mechanical sounds that come from many, many different sources. The idea is to orchestrate all those little bits of sound to also be a part of his character so he can cock his head and look at something and you can hear a little funny squeak and in a way it is an expressive sound effect. So that is important too.” Wrapping up his sound contribution to the voice of Wall-E, Burtt stated that “It was a weird balance between sounding like it was generated by a machine but still having the warmth and intelligence, I call it soul, that a human being has”.

But, exactly what were these sounds? There were about 2,500 sound files in the film! Ben elaborates, “I think I or the team recorded every motor we ever came in touch with from appliances to jet planes, whatever! We just went wild. When Wall-E is going slowly [his treads] make a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said ‘I like that generator sound, that is cool and so where can I get one?’ I found one on eBay. I bought it. I had recorded biplanes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s biplanes have a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up, you do it by hand and then you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. I couldn’t bring a biplane into the studio but on eBay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, brought it in.”

Wall-E’s little “eyebrow” movements are a Nikon camera shutter and his arms are the sound of a canon on a tank. Wall-E’s tiny cockroach pal skitters around to the sound of a pair of police handcuffs clicking as Ben took them apart and put them back together! Eve’s flying was accompanied by the sound of a radio-controlled jet plane. A great windstorm effect was created in a very funny way; by running up and down a carpeted hallway with a big, heavy canvas bag!

Are there any little Pixar in-jokes or tributes to their other characters in Wall-E? Yes, but you’ll just have to be surprised. Andrew did let us know that Wall-E’s “home” contains the T-Rex from Toy Story and Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. is in there somewhere too.

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