Stanton: Animating Pixar

“First you were like ‘whoa,’ and we were like ‘whoa,’ and you were like ‘whoa.’”

So says Andrew Stanton as the voice of Crush, the lovable surfer-dude sea turtle in “Finding Nemo.” Stanton is no stranger to things that are “whoa.” In the film industry he has something of a Midas touch. Perhaps best known for writing “Toy Story,” the movie that ushered in computer animation as the wave of the future, Stanton has been involved with a long list of hits since the fateful days when he penned the pages of Pixar’s first feature film. Three years after “Toy Story” came “A Bug’s Life,” followed by “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters, Inc,” and finally 2004’s Academy-Award winning “Finding Nemo.” Stanton doesn’t only write the screenplays for these Disney/Pixar blockbusters. He also co-directed “A Bug’s Life” and directed “Finding Nemo,” worked on character design and animation on “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life,” produced “Monsters, Inc.” and “Ratatouille,” and provided voice work for characters in “Cars,” “The Incredibles,” the “Toy Story” films, and, of course, “Finding Nemo.” But Stanton’s most “whoa” project of all is yet to be seen.

“When I finished Nemo I wanted something more out of the box, something even more challenging,” he told The Crimson in a recent phone interview. That challenge is “Wall•E,” the story of a trash-collecting robot left alone on Earth for 700 years, long after humans have vanished from the planet.

“[Wall•E was] a character we’d been sitting on for almost 14 years by now…and I couldn’t get that character out of my head,” said Stanton, who first thought of the idea for Wall•E at the same brainstorming lunch where “Finding Nemo” and “A Bug’s Life” were conceived.

Drawing Wall•E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) was a challenge, Stanton notes, because inanimate objects, especially robots, are not easy to conceptualize in an animation scheme. “It’s not obvious how they might move or think or act…but the biggest thing is how they’re designed. We looked for things that made you already want to see a character in the machine.”

This machine, though, is no typical Disney/Pixar character. For one, it doesn’t speak our language. “I wanted you to believe it as a machine that was thinking on its own, I didn’t want you to think it was a cartoon character,” Stanton says. “That made me think it shouldn’t speak.”

Wall•E, he said, is in many ways influenced by R2-D2 from the “Star Wars” series. “It was clearly a machine. There was nothing anthropomorphic about it, and it just did a lot of beeping.” Stanton recruited Ben Burtt, who designed R2-D2’s “voice” in “Star Wars,” to join the Wall•E team. Ultimately, Burtt crafted the various sound-languages spoken by all of the robotic characters in the movie.

Stanton says Wall•E, though less talkative than some of his previous animated characters, is “probably the most charming” of all the ones he’s invented. “By the end of all the rewriting, all the movies are character-driven….We just loved the sad, lonely, futile aspect of the character.” But fear not; “Wall•E” is not a tragedy.

“It’s a love story, a love story between two robots,” Stanton said. Wall•E meets a fellow robot Eve, who arrives in a spaceship from another planet and brings adventure into lonely Wall•E’s life. Even robots, Stanton says, have to eventually ask the question, “Does what I’m doing matter?” Eventually Wall•E comes to the understanding that, in Stanton’s words, “the point of living is to love.”

Sounds like your typical animated movie—part sappy, part funny, part sci-fi. So does this mean “Wall•E,” set to be released on June 27, is more of the same from Disney/Pixar? Not if Stanton can help it. “We try very hard not to make the same movie twice, and the way we do that is by a director-driven studio. We are investing in the director.”

So far, Stanton has proved a safe investment for Disney/Pixar. “Toy Story” alone grossed hundreds of millions worldwide. But what’s in it for Stanton? “I get to work with the most talented, funniest, cleverest, smartest people that I’ve ever met. That inspires me not just every day but every hour.”

—Staff writer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.