Word: pixar
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...there's any anxiety at Pixar about doing an I Am Legend for the junior set, you won't hear it from John Lasseter, Pixar's creative director and the inventive mind behind Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Cars. He's his usual beaming, cartoon-round, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing self as he waxes rhapsodic about WALL?E and, in passing, confides the secret of the studio's success: "The people who work here are doing what they've wanted to do their whole lives...
That would sound like cult-leader talk from anyone else. But a visitor to Pixar HQ in Emeryville, Calif. (where the upscale cafeteria serves iced tea, not Kool-Aid), finds a workforce that is able to channel a child's sense of play and wild imagination into the business of CGI moviemaking. The trick: never grow up. Lasseter's office shelves groan with hundreds of gewgaws from Pixar films. "I love toys," he says unabashedly. "A lot of animators love toys...
...love--the child's belief that a piece of cloth or a machine can have life, feelings, personality--is at the heart of many Pixar movies, beginning with Lasseter's '80s shorts Luxo, Jr. (whose lamp became the i in the company's logo), Red's Dream and Tin Toy, all made to demonstrate the possibilities of the infant CGI medium but with the savvy and sentiment of a natural storyteller. Stanton says he has seen Luxo, Jr. dozens of times, yet, "Miraculously, I get caught up every time" in the wordless story of father-and-son lamps. Take that...
...that the amazing dimension Burtt brought to the film. Signing with Pixar after 28 years at Lucasfilm Ltd., he got this plum of a project: he'd be creating most of WALL?E's sounds, from the hero's voice (Burtt's own, which he stretched, distorted and metallicized on his computer keyboard) to the wind of WALL?E's world ("That's just Niagara Falls") and the sound of the bot driving around ("It's taken from a tank, but it's made to sound tiny...
...Pixar, at its best, invents its own challenges. The typical director worries that most people will see his movie at home, their fingers on the fast-forward and stop buttons, so he makes every element instantly understandable. That's why most movies seem as if they were made for the passengers of the Axiom. But WALL?E plays without safety nets or spoon-feeding; it reinvents the delicate, potent behavioral language of silent-film comedy, of the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films...