He is rusty, lipless, subliterate and keeps company with garbage. Worse, he's a Hello, Dolly! fan. This little robot, who goes by the name Wall-E - for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class - is also the newest face (not that he has one) of Pixar.
Last year's offering, Ratatouille, about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with Wall-E, a US$180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin.
Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn't care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not. "I never think about the audience," he said. "If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away."
Stanton, 42, sat in a Toronto hotel room this month, shaggy-haired and bearded, bouncing in his chair with a tween's frenzied energy. In this way he seemed to embody the anti-corporate posture that is part of the Pixar mythology. When John Lasseter, Pixar's chief creative executive, announced the company's US$7.4 billion acquisition by the Walt Disney Co in 2006, he did so in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Employees at the Pixar "campus" in Emeryville, California, ride scooters and play foosball. "It's like a film school with no teachers," Stanton said. "Everyone actually wants you to take risks."
Such is the Pixar brand, or anti-brand: a multibillion US dollar company that acts like a nerd hobbyist in a basement. But that balancing act is even tougher to pull off as a subsidiary of Disney, a company whose very name has been turned into a neologism - Disneyfication - for a kind of bland commercial aesthetic.
Perhaps to assure the public that nothing has changed under new ownership, an early trailer for Wall-E - which opens in Taiwan late next month - plays up Pixar's carefree mystique. The teaser, narrated by Stanton, describes a 1994 lunch, when the central Pixar players were finishing Toy Story, the first feature-length CG animated film. Over lunch they sketched on napkins characters that would end up in A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo.
On one napkin a lonely robot emerged. "We said: 'What if humanity left and some little robot got left on and kept doing the same thing forever?'" said Stanton, who joined Pixar in 1990 as its second animator and ninth employee. "That was the saddest character I'd ever heard of."
Wall-E took a back seat to another project, a film Stanton wrote and directed about a fish father looking for his son: Finding Nemo (2003). It went on to earn US$340 million domestically and US$865 million worldwide. The day after the 2004 Academy Awards, in which Stanton won the Oscar for best animated feature, he went to work on Wall-E, forgoing a planned six-month vacation.
"We were always frustrated that people saw CG as a genre as opposed to just a medium that could tell any kind of story," he said. "We felt like we widened the palette with Toy Story, but then people unconsciously put CG back in a different box: 'Well, it's got to be irreverent, it's got to have A-list actors, it's got to have talking animals.'"
So Stanton took Wall-E to a more somber, less sassy place (though there is some sass of course). The film is set in 2700 on an uninhabitable Earth, a dystopia covered in towers of garbage. Stanton drew on films from science fiction's golden age: "1968 to 1981," he said, with a film geek's specificity. Software imitated the film - mostly Panavision 70mm - that gave movies like 2001 and Blade Runner their visual sweep. Casting Sigourney Weaver in one of a handful of speaking parts is a nod to Alien. Wall-E, a generic robo-janitor, contentedly compacts trash into perfect cubes, until he's shaken up by the appearance of an egg-shaped search robot named Eve. This high-tech, piano-key-smooth egg-bot has dropped from the sky, seeking a sign of life on Earth. Wall-E, who knows about love from a video of Hello, Dolly!, falls hard.
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