Robotic loneliness, love and yearning
may not seem like the most natural jumping off points for an animated
film, or any movie for that matter, but those questions were at the
heart of Wall▪E, according to director Andrew Stanton. “We
had this lunch around the time of Toy Story, in 1994, where we
were batting around any idea we could think of to try and come up
with what the next movie would be,” recalls Stanton. “One of the
half-brained sentences tossed out was, ‘What if we did the last robot
on Earth — everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it
can stop?’ All the details weren’t there, there
wasn’t a name for the character and we didn’t even know what it would
look like. But it was just the loneliest scenario
I’d ever heard and I just loved it; I think that’s why it stayed in
the ether for so long.”

The yawning interim between Wall▪E‘s
inception and release, marked by some noodling around and roughly
four years of production work, have of course been filled with
animated hit after hit from Pixar — nine theatrical releases in all,
and around $5 billion in ticket sales. Still, there’s no simple
formula. “We’re always trying to be different with every movie,”
says Stanton. “We’re a director-driven studio and we’re trying to
encourage and support the (director’s) vision so that every film will
be unique, and have its own taste and slant. But I knew going in that
this was more of a major unconventional film, even when we just had
the character conceit and nothing else.” For the full interview feature piece, from Reelz, click here.