“I don’t have a political bent here. I don’t have an ecological message to push. … Everything I wanted to show here was based on the love story,” Stanton told the assembled journalists. “[As a plot device I decided] I have to get everybody off the planet. I have to do it in a way that you get it without any dialogue. You have to be able to get it visually in less than a minute. So the trash did that. You look at it, you get it. And you have to move it; even a little kid understands that. It allows Wall·E to sift through everything we left behind on the planet to show that he’s interested in us. So I had to look at everything from the point of view of how you understand it visually without dialogue to describe it.”
Of course, as is Pixar’s custom, the level of detail in those skyscraper-sized piles of junk cubes Wall·E has spent centuries stacking is staggering. Animators create two distinct worlds for the film: the dreary deserted earth with its piles of junk and the sleek futuristic spaceship Axiom that now houses the migratory human race. Both settings show an unprecedented amount of detail.
Pixar animators also had the daunting task of creating characters that show emotion without using traditional dialogue or facial movement. According to Stanton “the characters seem robotic because they don’t squash and stretch. That was really a brain tease for the animators to figure out how to get the same ideas communicated and timed the way it would sell from a storytelling standpoint, yet still feel like the machine was acting within the limitations of its design and construction.” Yet with simple movement and excellent sound editing the animators did just that.
This is a challenge that Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt and his team struggled to overcome. In a fantasy film, Burtt believes that sound acts on people invisibly. Sound becomes the aspect of the film that holds everything together, he says. Burtt’s goal is to convince the audience that what they see is dramatic and real, based simply on what they hear.
“For Wall·E, I think the team has recorded every motor we ever came in touch with … from appliances to jet planes,” says Burtt. “The idea of taking natural sounds and imposing them into a fantasy world gives the illusion that these things are real. We kind of recognize these sounds even though we can’t identify them fully.”
According to Burtt, Wall·E has more sound files than any single feature film he’s ever worked on—over 2500. “Every character has a set of sounds; there is lots of movement, lots of dense activity.” And rather than rely on computer-synthesized sound, Burtt’s team used mostly real, man-made sounds from motors and equipment. For example: Wall·E’s treads, when moving slowly, are an old fashioned hand electric generator; for his treads moving fast, a higher-pitched energetic sound that Burtt recorded from an old biplane inertia crank starter. Wall·E’s eyebrows are a Nikon camera shutter; his arms sounds are the azimuth motor on a tank cannon.
