Director: 'WALL-E' is just an old-fashioned sci-fi flick

No, no, no, says "WALL-E," creator Andrew Stanton - Pixar's new movie is not sending an environmental message.

Yes, the movie's set in the future, and the world's been pretty much ruined by us. Yes, the planet is a big, uninhabitable pile of garbage, and it's our garbage.

But no, he says, there is no eco-warrior agenda, and Pixar is not sending invisible waves of green activism into the vulnerable minds of our unsuspecting children.

"We wanted to make an interesting science fiction movie. And every interesting science fiction movie you can think of, certainly every science fiction movie that I loved growing up, starts with a future in which something very bad has happened," Stanton observed.

This is true. The empire has struck back, or HAL is trying kill Dave, or Dave is trying to kill HAL, or something awful's about to erupt from John Hurt's stomach, or apes rule the earth and the Statue of Liberty is buried in the sand, and Charlton Heston is screaming "Damn you!" at a long-expired race of arrogant, irresponsible people, who would also be us.

"WALL-E," by comparison, is a happy, hopeful movie, about a spunky trash-collecting robot that's still cleaning up our mess, years after we've vanished.

He's the last robot on Earth and somebody forgot to turn him off. That was Stanton's original idea, legendarily scribbled on napkins at a meeting of Pixar founders a decade ago, when they simultaneously came up with ideas for "Finding Nemo," "Monsters, Inc.," and "A Bug's Life."

Stanton eventually made the robot story his, and he still remembers the advice he got from a fellow Pixar brain:

"You can't make a cute robot and put him in a happy village. Then it's asinine," Stanton explained. "The reason [WALL-E] is so charming is because he's in the bleak environment."

Pixar animators worked hard to find the poetry inherent in that contrast.

"We loved the idea that the most human thing left in the world, the being that cares most about living, was this machine, who is still hard at work long after we've gone," Stanton said.

Gone.

Lovable as WALL-E is, that's a stark concept around which to build a family movie. "WALL-E" has no human characters, no comic animals (save a cockroach), no conventional dialogue, for some 30 minutes. No effort is made to explain why WALL-E is the last machine still working, why he collects human artifacts, where he gets his baseline artificial intelligence.

It's all in the art. Unlike a traditional studio, Pixar guys don't lose sleep wondering if kids are going to "get it." They don't test-screen.

"Hey, we're animators. We're an arrested development group. We retain enough immaturity to be confident that children will understand what we're doing," Stanton said.

In WALL-E's case, Pixar operated under the assumption kids would understand him as "the janitor," while adults could see layers of sophistication, particularly as the movie's complex attitudes toward technology and machines unfold.

WALL-E falls in love with another machine, a mysterious and beautiful probe, which turns out to have links to a ship full of humans who may be preparing to re-colonize the planet.

"For us, the movie starts with this fascination with robots, and we play around with the infinite ways they can be incredibly charming. But we're aware of the times, especially as animators, doing the kind of work we do with computers. Technology advances so rapidly. Look at the last 20 years. It seems like on a yearly basis, there's another wonderful new option you can use to distract yourself from having a real life. That's a different avenue, and that's eventually where the movie goes," Stanton said.

What connects everything, he said, is the overarching goal of achieving the power of the movies that Stanton fell in love with as a young consumer of science fiction movies (he's cited "Star Wars," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Alien," "Blade Runner," and others).

"I've got to say the fuel that consciously drove me was thinking of the movies I was exposed to, from '68 to '83, basically through the '70s golden age. These are sci-fi films that transported you to different worlds, that left you with a sense of wonder.

"Maybe I've just gotten old and bitter, but I don't think that's happened for 15 or 20 years. We wanted to give people an idea of what it was like to go to the theater and see a movie like that." *