A robotic love story with heart

In 1995, Pixar Animation Studios released Toy Story, the first full-length CGI film ever released. The movie grossed about 200 million and was followed by feature like A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo and Cars. On June 27, the studio comes out with its newest release, WALL-E, hyped as being almost as different from anything the public has seen, as Toy Story was before.

“We’re not starting a whole new medium,” said Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of WALL-E and a bevy of other Pixar films.

He maintains, however, that this was an exciting and fresh film to produce, more so even than Finding Nemo, the underwater winner of 34 awards including an Oscar.

“Every film’s different,” Stanton said. “We try very hard not to make the same movie twice … by making it a director-driven studio. That’s the only way to make it not come across like it’s some sort of committed product that’s out their trying to … win the masses.”

The idea behind WALL-E is this: What if mankind had to leave Earth, and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?

The tale takes place in the 28th century, and the title character, a lonely robot, has spent 700 years working according to program.

The story begins to blossom when a female robot, EVE, zips into the life of the machine who has evolved from an automatic cleaner to a more humanoid appliance with personality. WALL-E follows his love interest across the Milky Way, all the while looking for meaning in his otherwise mundane existence.

“I definitely knew that when I finished Nemo I wanted to make something even more out-of-the-box, something more challenging, something that really … defied the definition of what an animated movie is a little bit,” Stanton said.

Though the robots have distinct and unique vocabularies, they don’t speak English; the producers sought to make them look like machines rather than cartoon characters. WALL-E is more like R2-D2 than C-3PO, and it’s no coincidence; Ben Burtt is behind the “voices” for both R2-D2 and the star of Pixar’s film, as well as many other characters in the animated movie. The dialog was made so viewers can feel the idea without understanding words.

Pixar makes movies with no specific audience intended, which seems to result in creations that can be appreciated by people of all kinds. Their only real viewer-based strategy is not to bring in content that will exclude kids. On the contrary, the writers and producers are self-professed movie geeks, and they make films for themselves, ones that they would like to see and those that haven’t been made yet.

It’s not official, but the company may move toward live-action in the more distant future. For now, expect to see computer-generated releases like John Carter of Mars, Up and the long awaited third installment to what will complete the Toy Story trilogy.

As to his career as a writer, Stanton said, “I’m neck-deep in writing another picture that will be very different from all of this that I can’t speak about just yet.”