Q: What did the role of directing animator on WALL-E involve?

AM: The Directing Animator’s job is to help the other animators keep their animation on model, so that the acting and movement are consistent for each of the characters over the entire film. They work to be both a surrogate voice of the Director when he/she is available, and also offer acting and performance suggestions. Directing Animators also help to define the motion and character of the main characters in the film. The Directing Animator reports directly to the Supervising Animators. On WALL-E, as well as The Incredibles, I worked under the Supervision Animators Alan Barillaro and Steven Hunter. They interface more with the production staff about the direction and management of the WALL-E animation department. They also serve as both a surrogate voice of the Director and also offer acting and performance suggestions as well. Time permitting, Supervising Animators will also help to define the motion and character of the main characters in the film.


Q: The WALL-E acronym stood for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class.” What is BURN-E short for?

AM: BURN-E stands for “Basic Utility Repair Nano Engineer.” I have since heard from some people that it should actually be BURN-A because the “E” in WALL-E stands for “Earth-Class” and the “A” would be the appropriate “Axiom-Class.” Now I could argue that BURN-E was a robot on Earth that was installed on the Axiom, but a) I would be lying, and b) What’s the point? If that’s the biggest problem you have with the film, then I have done my job. Now put yourself in my shoes. You have to name this robot. BURN-E is funny and breaks the continuity of the film. BURN-A is more accurate to the feature and is not funny at all. Which would you choose? I thought so. I do love that geeks pick up on this and I am happy to be creating this controversy. I’d probably do the same thing, were I not involved. Jim Reardon, head of story on WALL-E, thought of the name. Derek Thompson and fellow story artist Ted Mathot came up with the acronym.

Q: Brad Bird created the similarly fun companion short Jack-Jack Attack for The Incredibles. What are your thoughts on side-stories like these?

AM: I am a big fan of side stories. Coincidentally, I had a side story pitch for The Incredibles that Brad was excited about, but budget constraints kept us from doing it. I think it’s important that the side story not belittle or betray the main story. If the main story is about the existence of the Easter Bunny, the side story can’t say there is no Easter Bunny or it messes with the feature.

Q: What made you choose BURN-E as the main subject?

AM: I was drawn to BURN-E because his story was not fully explored in the feature. I like M-O, but he is in the feature a lot already, so I did not feel like his story needed to be told as urgently. Also I liked the idea of having a short that took place outside the central story arc of WALL-E.


Q: How did BURN-E’s story originate?

AM: As a filmgoer, I wanted to know what happened to BURN-E. I had a few ideas of places we could cut back to BURN-E in the feature, but it slowed the pace of the film down. Once Andrew encouraged me to take these ideas and develop them into a short, I needed to find a unifying story arc. I came up with this idea of him having a job and that job would be repairing this light. Then I thought, it would be funny to have WALL-E inadvertently cause this meteor to hit the light on the ship. This led to the central idea of the short. In the feature, WALL-E has a positive effect on everyone he meets. So I thought, what if there is someone for whom WALL-E ‘s arrival on the Axiom isn’t a good thing. WALL-E is never purposefully mean to BURN-E, it’s just bad luck. Once I had that central idea I looked for key moments in the film to cut back to BURN-E to see what he was doing at that particular time.

Q: How hard was it to get the just right type of emotion out of a robot?

AM: It is always our goal as animators to make our work clearly communicate the thought process of the characters to the audience. It was particularly challenging for us on BURN-E as well as WALL-E because of the limited nature of the designs and the lack of dialogue. Both characters limited designs are appealing, but more work must be done in the story process to communicate his intentions. With BURN-E and with WALL-E, if the audience can’t tell what the character is thinking or what is going on, then they lose interest very quickly.

Q: Did you work on BURN-E during or after the production of WALL-E?

AM: Both. I started boarding BURN-E on the evenings and lunches when we were in the heat of animation production on WALL-E. Once the animation was wrapping up on the feature, production started on BURN-E. It dovetailed nicely, but I did have to put off a May vacation till August.

Q: How long did it take you to produce BURN-E?

AM: I first pitched the storyboard to Andrew Stanton in November 2007 and we finished production in late June 2008.


Q: BURN-E is your first film as a director. Do you see this film as a steppingstone towards directing features?

AM: BURN-E was a tremendous opportunity for me. The shorts program at Pixar is designed to be a training ground for potential future directors and new department heads. Sometimes that translates into directing features or heading departments on features and sometimes not. I have stories that I’d like to tell, so we’ll see what happens.

Q: How much freedom do you have at Pixar as a director on a little film like this?

AM: I pitched the film to Andrew and John Lasseter. Once they bought off on the concept, I was free to pretty much do as I wished. There were budget considerations, but there weren’t any compromises that hurt the film. I checked in with Andrew periodically and if there was anything that wasn’t reading or could be improved he would make notes. I would say that 95% of his notes made the film better. Mostly, he had notes on pacing. BURN-E, by nature, is fairly episodic. He had a lot of notes that kept the pace from slowing to a crawl. Freedom as a director is also the freedom to make a bad movie. I had the support of an extremely talented crew so anything that was bad they did there best to fix.

Q: John has previously said that Pixar’s shorts provide animators with the opportunity to experiment with new challenges outside the confines and limitations of a feature. Were there any particular technical or story challenges you set out to accomplish with BURN-E?

AM: The biggest challenge was how to make a 7+ minute film on a budget. I was allowed to make a film that long if it came in on budget. To be honest, I think the budget constraint helped. I wanted the film to look like a ’70s-’80s Sci-Fi films. On those films, they built awesome sets on limited budget. We used a lot of the same principles of repeated forms for BURN-E. As an homage, the floor grating in BURN-E is based on floor grating in featured in the movies Outland, Alien, and Aliens.

Q: What was the most challenging aspect of BURN-E?

AM: There were a lot of difficult shots to pull off in this film. From a technical perspective, the shot with WALL-E touching Saturn’s rings that transitions into the pebble meteor was the hardest to pull off. The Effects Supervisor, Bill Watral did a fabulous job stitching the shot from the film and a bunch of new elements that were on a literally planetary scale. On the performance side, the shot where SUPPLY-R drops the light on the ground was the trickiest to get right. There was something in the boards that was really funny that was extremely difficult to capture.

Q: Could you give a piece of advice to all those who start in this of the animation and dream of working in Pixar or on a project like this someday?

AM: Surround yourself with people whose work you admire and whose opinions you trust. In school, I worked really hard and sought out others who did the same. In your work, make sure that you are making something that you believe in. In BURN-E, I tried to have at least one thing in each shot that was true, real, or relatable. Make the world of your film believable and relatable and the audience will follow.

WALL-E

OPENING DATE: 06/28/2008

STUDIO: Disney

TRAILER: Trailer

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
After 700 years of doing what he was built for – he’ll discover what he’s meant for.

Opening Statement
Pixar has demonstrated a digital midas touch since they stormed onto the big-screen scene 13 years ago with Toy Story. Almost singlehandedly, they transformed CGI animation from a gimmick into the preferred mode of children’s storytelling. From the review buzz I kept hearing, I went into WALL-E expecting it to be Pixar’s crowning achievement. It isn’t, but it’s still the best family film you’ll see this year. Brilliantly blending adorable robots with keen social commentary and genuinely good science fiction, this is an important piece of the 2008 summer line-up.

Facts of the Case
700 years after Earth has been abandoned by humanity under a pathetic heap of garbage, only one of the waste management robots left behind to clean up our mess is still active. Somewhere in that expanse of time, WALL-E (Ben Burtt) has developed sentience. Perhaps it’s the loneliness of his solitary existence, or his growing fascination with the garbage he’s been instructed to collect. Either way, he works during the day to cube up giant towers of garbage, then spends the evenings collecting interesting objects and rewatching his VHS copy of Hello Dolly. That longing for contact is fulfilled when a scout ship arrives, delivering the sleek sophisticated EVE probe bot, and WALL-E is immediately smitten. He will do anything to capture her affection, even if that means traveling through space and saving humanity.

The Evidence
There are a lot of reasons to like WALL-E. It’s a beautiful film, and one that highlights Pixar’s rare ability to make a film with almost universal appeal. The production team remembers that “family film” doesn’t mean the same thing as “kid’s movie,” and creates something parents will enjoy rather than simply tolerate. Pixar is also uncompromising with the overall vision for the film, making a number of risky choices that pay off. That said, it’s also a film with big commercial appeal. They are a studio who realizes success comes from bold risks, not safe bets.

As a film, WALL-E‘s success lives or dies on the appeal of the main character. WALL-E is onscreen almost continually, and he barely speaks. And yet, he has been infused with so much personality that the audience is transfixed by him for the whole running time. In the future, robots have more personality than humans do; personality that comes out of the functions they were built with. This semi-sentience is handled brilliantly, as simple fact rather than as miracle or global disaster.

Speaking of global disasters, WALL-E also shows a chilling version of the future. The initial view of Earth as a gigantic garbage dump is frightening, being slowly revealed as we watch WALL-E work. This isn’t a complex message, but it’s well-aimed to the audience of children: the result of our wasteful culture could destroy the world. When we finally do meet the humans, the image is even more disturbing. Massively obese people float around on chairs, their eyes taken up by screens held close to their faces. Their hearing is absorbed by electronics that connect them to the world around them, both their friends and advertising. Perhaps most scary is the fact that it’s all run by a giant corporation called BnL, which dominates the sickly sweet, Wal-Mart future. The humans are reduced to raw consumerism, a captive market from birth to death. I’m not sure how much of this young kids will get, but it’s a far more ambitious message than I’ve seen in most animated features.

In actuality, though, none of these dire messages are required to enjoy the movie. We watched WALL-E at a Saturday matinee full of young kids, and although some of the youngest tykes were asking quite a few questions throughout the film, they all left talking excitedly about how much fun it was. With the dazzling visuals, it’s easy to see why kids can get by missing out on some of these finer points. With slightly older children, though, I can see WALL-E stirring good discussions afterwards, exploring some of the topics introduced by the film. The animation is a step up from Ratatouille, bordering on photorealistic when focused on the backdrops and robots. Humans still have a ways to go, but the level of detail presented here is truly astounding, and on a much larger scale than the studio has attempted in the past.

Rebuttal Witnesses
Despite all of this praise, I have to admit that I left the theatre feeling a bit disappointed. I’m not sure that all of the risks Pixar took this time around played out as well as they have in the past.

First, there is the choice to blend some live action footage in with the animation. This is something that Pixar has never done before, and they wanted to find a vivid way to distinguish the present from the future. This choice comes with two unwanted side effects. It’s oddly distracting, for one, although I like that they chose Fred Willard (A Mighty Wind) as the BnL CEO. The animated humans still don’t look that realistic in a realistic world, and seeing real footage just reminds us of that.

It’s also a bit hard to swallow the ending. While I think it’s crucial for a movie with this social message to have an ending of hope, the conclusion of WALL-E comes far too easy. The humans aren’t as grotesque as they should be either; the animation style simply makes them cute and soft. Obviously, some limits need to be placed to protect younger viewers, but it softens the overall impact.

All of these complaints are minor ones; issues that prevent WALL-E from claiming the Pixar crown from The Incredibles, not ones that prevent it from holding its robotic head high among its peers. This is a fine family film, one I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.

Closing Remarks
In a summer packed full of heroic adventures, the most compelling superhero may end up being its most unassuming: a cute little trash compacting robot named WALL-E. This is a film that all North American families should experience together, both for the joy of watching the film, and the meaningful discussions that will come out of its timely message.

The Verdict
After a long 700 years, WALL-E is hereby released of his duties, and free to pursue his dreams.

9/10