WALL-E is a real character
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?As robots go, the star of Pixar’s “WALL-E” isn’t much to look at. With his mechanical arms, tank treads for feet and oversize camera lens/eyes, the mobile trash compactor is definitely old-school and low-tech.
Which is just the way Andrew Stanton likes him. “I put robots into two camps,” says the Pixar veteran and writer-director of “WALL-E,” opening Friday.
“There’s the Tin Man category, where they’re basically a metal human, and the R2-D2s who are designed for a particular function and you read character into them - which I think is a way more fulfilling experience.”
He might look like a metal box, but WALL-E is definitely a character. With a vocabulary limited to a handful of words and whistles (courtesy of “Star Wars” sound designer Ben Burtt), the plucky robot needed another way to put his feelings out there.
Even though his adventures take place hundreds of years from now on an abandoned Earth, WALL-E has more in common with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton than with the ominous androids usually seen in sci-fi flicks.
“We looked at everything those guys did,” says Stanton, who won an Oscar for writing and directing “Finding Nemo.”
“We watched a Chaplin film and one of Keaton’s at lunch every day for almost a year until we saw their entire body of work. We walked away thinking there’s almost no emotion you can’t convey visually. It gave us the courage to take a risk to get it across: If those guys did it, we could too.
“Chaplin wore his heart on his sleeve. But in terms of humor, of how much you can convey with very little, we definitely pulled from Keaton’s playbook,” adds Stanton. “He was the Great Stone Face - his expression never changed very much, and neither does WALL-E’s.”
- from NYDailynews
WALL-E Featurette shows how Andrew Stanton and Co. brought in DP Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Shawshank Redemption) to give them advice on how some of the sequences might actually be lit and shot if it there were an actual camera there: