“WALL-E is the first one for me where we came up with a character and we liked him so much without any understanding of what the story would be,” explains the Pixar veteran. “It was literally the phrase, ‘What if for some reason humanity had to leave earth and someone forgot to turn the last robot off? And he didn’t know that he could just stop doing what he was built to do and did it forever?’ And it was such a lonely character that you cared about him immediately. We spend so much time trying to make our main characters and their situations engaging, and to make you care and make you want to invest in them and whatever their plight is. To suddenly come up with a character and without any plot you already care and already want to know what’s going to happen to him, was kind of like gold.
“Almost immediately we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if he was like R2D2, and it wasn’t a character who spoke English; he spoke exactly the way it was built and it was faithful to the integrity of how it was constructed? And any other machine it meets does the same?’” continues Stanton. “We weren’t doing a silent movie of any sort, because there are people talking throughout the movie, but we thought, ‘What if, depending on where you come from and who you are and how you’re built, that’s how you speak?’ As animators, that’s like waving red meat in front of a dog! That is so exciting to think about how you would act that, how you would pantomime that, how you would come up with shtick and how you would sell it. Limitations are so attractive when they’re set in the right place.”
CREATING WALL-E
There’s been quite an evolution of WALL-E, whose initial inspiration came from the Luxo Lamp that serves as part of the company’s logo, and grew from there.
“I wanted something that felt like an appliance first and a character second,” explains Stanton. “It was a very slow, piece-by-piece process of designing the character. I used to always use the example that there’s the Tin Man on one end of the spectrum – which is just a guy with metal skin – and then there’s R2D2 on the other side, which is a machine. It’s a can. I said that I wanted to see how close I could be to the R2D2 side, so it would look like a Luxo and make me want to imply through inference what I think that character is thinking, which is much more satisfying. It’s the way we look at our pets, it’s the way we look at infants before they can speak. You know, ‘Oh, I think it’s hungry; I think it wants to be held,’ and you end up drawing from your personal well of emotions you have, which is always going to be stronger than anything I can instill in a story. So that was the thing: how to design something that made you want to invest in it and made you want to guess what it was thinking. But I knew I couldn’t have a simple cone lamp that just went up and down, so I was wracking my brain for something else.”
The answer came to him several years ago when he was attending a baseball game. “I missed a good part of the game because someone passed me their binoculars,” he reflects, “and I started turning them around and playing with them and looking at them. It’s like when you were a kid and you made binoculars look sad and made them happy and I realized, ‘Oh my God, that’s it! I can get the same angles up and down, from the side, that I could from the Luxo Lamp. Because the lamp was amazing in that just lifting the cone of the lamp up made you feel like it was optimistic, and when it went down, it was sad. But then with the binoculars I could get this second dimension from looking at it from the front, and get even subtler degrees of going from sad to happy with it. So I knew that was my face for the character. Nothing’s trying to be a nose, nothing is trying to be a mouth. I just took it out of the equation.
“And then I knew it needed to box up cubes of trash, because the story required that that’s what he’s been doing for 700 years,” Stanton continues. “So I started looking at trash compactors, and we started trying to figure out how cute could we make him by putting this binocular head on this box that makes trash. And then eventually the arms came in and the legs came in, because he had to be all-terrain. He had to be able to get all over the place, but I always wanted to make sure he could be as compact as he could. I was thinking of a turtle; I wanted him to be able to make those arms and legs disappear so that if I didn’t want them around, I could just see him as a little box with these binocular eyes. And I had one rule: somehow he had to be designed with no elbows. Somehow, whenever you saw elbows on the arms, it just looked like a human, so I said to get rid of that.
“The idea,” he closes, “was to make this machine able to do everything it has to do, but with the least amount of moving parts. And then we came up with this sort of dump truck idea on the back; just the way you’d see the back of a dump truck that comes past your house to pick up the trash, and it ended up looking like a little kid’s backpack on him. So it really evolved over time, all coming off of the eyes. That was something that dropped into my lap with the binoculars.”