Slashdot Mirror
Wall-E Supervising Animator Tells His Story
Denofgeek wrote in to tell us about their story where "Pixar's supervising animator Angus MacLane gives an interesting interview about the technical challenges in bringing Wall-E to the screen. Plus he squeezes in a bit on his love of Lego, too..."
Anyone else want to go see this just for the shorts in the beginning?
Actually, Wall-E was much different than I expected. I know the critics really liked it, but I found it to be a bit heavy for younger kids, and probably not enough to grab very young kids' attentions. As an adult though, I thought the movie was incredible. I hadn't really read up on it before viewing it and had no idea it was going to be an entire social commentary-esque movie.
Definitely makes you think, though! And the animation was absolutely breathtaking at times.
-MelRom
I will admit - I don't watch too many movies. However, I am extremely glad I spent the money to see Wall-E and I will be buying it on DVD when it is released.
The animation of this movie is amazing. Using almost no words (two?), the animation team captures a wide range of emotion: love, sadness, fear, humor and anger. What's even better is that they capture these emotions in the form of robots - something that typically is not associated with emotion. The storyline itself is fantastic. Not only is it simplistic enough that even a child can understand it and enjoy it, there is a definite adult theme throughout the entire movie which emphasizes taking care of this planet that we live on.
Additionally, this movie starts up with a great short (haha...that rabbit is awesome), the ending credits are absolutely beautiful and genius (how many different art styles can you spot?) and the soundtrack is great.
I would highly recommend that everybody check this movie out in the theater. It's definitely worth it.
Will-E is the robotic image of ET. Expect a lawsuit after Will-E cashes in the millions from the kids around the world.
Well maybe not best movie EVER, but close to it. And I'm someone who's always found Pixar's stuff way overrated.
Screw the kids! Hollywood already tries to make every damn movie PG, including Alien Sodomizes Terminator and its clones. I am glad whenever a movie is trying not to be simplistic and infantile like almost everything else. Fortunately, ours is a decade of really good, often brilliant, animation.
I think this answers your question:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
To be quite honest, I wasn't all that thrilled about going to this movie. I walked into the movie by request of my little brother, and I figured I'd at least get a few laughs out of the movie.
What I got was a masterpiece.
Not two minutes into the film, I was enthralled by the sheer beauty of the landscapes. The incongruity between the cheerful opening tune and the devastated Earth landscape is absolutely delightful.
Also, Pixar has gotten so good at what they do that they don't even need words to tell a story. The first 45 minutes of the movie has pretty much ZERO dialogue with the exception of BnL ads for background. Oh, also a word or two (literally) from the robots.
Particularly well done were the flight scenes - the part in the beginning where EVE watches the ship leave and start cruising around while WALL-E watches in awe, and when the two of them are dancing around the Axiom. I could watch those two scenes over and over again and still be thrilled.
Also, the (oft overlooked) soundtrack is phenomenal as well. I bought it the instant I could, and I've had it on repeat for about a week now. (2815 AD and Define Dancing are my favorites)
I can honestly say that this is the best (in terms of sheer all-around quality) film that I have ever seen, and I fully expect this to just rake in its well-deserved awards.
Wall-E was an incredible movie. The character development was outstanding, emotions were believable, and scenes really made impressions on me.
What I found most interesting about TFA was about the software they use for long-term development.
It said that for long-term development movies (Wall-E was 3 years, right?) they use the same software all the way through. I had always wondered about that kind of thing.. Since 3D software and rendering engines and such is always improving, how do these guys make the movies? Do they constantly re-render with the better software throughout the process, etc.? How do they keep up with competition in that regard?
So it was neat to finally find that out. The article also offers a lot of insight into the team arrangement at Pixar. I like that they aren't chained to animating a certain character/part- That they really observe who likes to animate who and what kind of scenes and kind of let them do what they enjoy best in the project. I wish programming jobs were like that- Where we could work on parts that we really liked instead of being moved from language to language and to different teams etc. like our preference doesn't matter. I think it's a really good thing they have over there.
If you haven't seen Wall-E yet, it's well worth the ticket price!
They were able to make a roach cute. And no, not some Disneyesque anthropomorphic huggable buggable plushified abomination to be mass-marketed to yowling ankle-biters everywhere, no, no, no! This was a realistic roach, the kind that makes me reach for a shoe and go Khrushchev on its filthy self. My family went to see this movie together and my own mother, my earliest memories of which involve her screaming hysterically and attacking palmetto bugs with a toilet plunger wielded with the sort of two-hand grip reserved for viking warhammers, she found the roach cute! She gasped when Wall-E rolled over it that last time, thinking it might be dead.
If Pixar can make her identify and sympathize with a realistic roach, the animators at those other studios should just hang up their keyboards and go home.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm getting out my violin just for you!
I absolutely agree; this film is a masterpiece, and what I find amazing is how Pixar turned the end credits into such a subtle and beautiful coda to the story. The art styles, and the scenes they depict, reflect the progressive rebirth of the newly-recolonized Earth, moving through hieroglyphics to a scene reminiscent of a Van Gogh painting, with Wall-E and EVE gazing up at the large tree, which one realizes is the same plant they struggled to protect, growing from the boot deep in the soil. I can't say enough about this wonderful film, and I continue to be stunned that Pixar keep outdoing themselves with each release.
Pixar, in some ways, is very retro. They like the Populuxe look of the 1950s and 1960s, and their stories are very linear. Pixar films have few, if any, interspersed subplots, flashbacks, or flash-forwards. Shots are long and cuts are few by modern standards.
They even seem to be done with the technology. Pixar's short films have historically been technology demos - they were trials of the next generation of animation. "Geri's Game", for example, is a cloth demo. "Presto" doesn't seem to introduce any new technology; it's just a nice piece of character animation.
Yes, I saw it in the theater, and yes, I liked it, in fact was impressed by it. But it is not the best Pixar movie evarrrr, in fact I'd have to struggle to put it in the top three. The plot was pretty thin, and the characters were not terribly developed or memorable. But from an adult's perspective, and taking the movies as a whole (animation+story+characters), Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Cars were really my three favorites, not necessarily in that order. Also the cute robot theme has been done before, and looked about the same then.
12:50 - press return.
The most important message wasn't taking care of the planet, but individualism and personal responsibility. Notice that all the people were dependent on the corporation (or it could have been government) for their every need. They all had the same clothes and ate the same food and lived in the same size rooms and had communal access to same facilities. The only individuals (and heroes) were the robots and the captain, plus John and Mary that broke out of the sameness. It's the theme of most Pixar movies: Incredibles - Exceptionalism should be rewarded, Cars - taking a different path is a good thing, Nemo - importance of family and not being afraid of life, Bug's Life - break out the the commune and use new ideas, Toy Story - freindship, loyalty and service. They may have thought they were making an environmental movie, but underlying Pixar theme of individual rights and personal responsibility shone through.
TFA reads like a verbatim transcription of a conversation with some (badly done)
abridgements. It definitely lacks some quotation marks to mark actual quotations,
and could've used quite some redacting. Like this, it is just sloppy and not very readable.
Yeah, yeah, sorry for RTFAing...
a). Frist psoting
Attention.
b). polluting the internets with the kind of foulness even sewage tanks are ashamed of harboring
Lulz.
c). specifically, is it something about Slashdot?
Nope.
d). Or just the nature of free anonymity in general?
Yup.
I think you mean Panavision.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Here's a definitive (at least as far as my observations go) list of Apple and Mac references in Wall-E:
1.) Old Quadra-vintage Mac Chord sound when Wall-E hits full solar charge.
2.) Eve was designed by Jonathan Ive, the creator of many Apple designs.
3.) Eve is made of the same shiny white plastic that has covered Mac products since the first Snow iMac, and the first white iBook.
4.) Eve's reboot sound is reminiscent of the 20th Anniversary Mac sound, the first and last time the sound was used.
5.) Autopilot also looks designed by Apple.
6.) Autopilot's voice is "Ralph," a Mac voice that dates back to the 68K era.
7.) Many have pointed out that Wall-E's eyes seem to do the same type of internal adjustments that the iSight did.
8.) The "foreign contaminant" voice that M-O uses is another Mac voice called "Zarvox." Zarvox is also from the same batch that Ralph is from.
9.) The fried card inside Wall-E, and also the cards Eve tries to use to replace it, all look like Apple II expansion cards.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
One of things I found somewhat odd in the movie was the use of the 3d "animated" people VS the use of "real" people. Many of the advertisements used real people, as did the little video that Wall-E liked to watch. However, other parts used animated characters, and the actually active characters in the movie were animated.
Was this a shortcut to save time, or was there some deeper point to this?
The annual SIGGRAPH meeting is in 24 days August 11-15 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Its the premiere event for seeing how entertainment graphics is done (great parties too). It can be attended very economically too: day passes are in the $50 range. One day-pass lets you see most of the technical exhibit and a different the film animation. The $800 pass is for attending the technical papers and courses (buy the proceedings) which good if you have all week and a generous boss. I'm flying in one morning, attending two days, leaving the following evening. There is light rail direct from LAX to the conventions center (slow). To me its like a science-fiction convention turned live- with all the futuristic computer graphics hardware and software (and great parties too).
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I heard an interview with Andrew Stanton.
It was interesting where he got a lot of the ideas for the movie. He also talks about traditional animation versus CG and how CG really helped his career because
his drawing skills were ok but not great.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Grumpy Gus.
You are all a bunch of idots.
My wife and I were just as floored at this movie as everyone else appears to be and we've yet to get over how wonderful a film it was/is. We are the type of people who rarely see films but we make it a point to go see Pixar movies because so far they've been quite enjoyable. We are even considering going back and seeing it again, which says a lot when we see only 2-3 films a year.
I wanted to pick up for my wife a little gift and get a Wall-E figurine or some type of toy and I wanted another one to sit by my vintage R2D2 on my desk. Much to my surprise, you can't find Wall-E toys in any store, ANYWHERE (other than the internet). I've searched multiple Targets and [grudgingly] Wal-Marts and I couldn't find anything. The only thing that I found was a book in Books-a-Million and the video game.
I guess Ratitoule didn't earn enough from it's merchandise that most stores decided that it wasn't worth purchasing the product.
Here's a hint, and I quote:
about yet another huge breach of privacy by Facebook
No Comment.
Funny you mention that because WALL-E was the first real departure of Pixar's common memes of road trips, and comedy routines, with everything ending wrapped up in a tidy little bow, as originally formulated by W-B and Disney. Ratatouille was a small step away. I found this blog post interesting
http://ghiblicon.blogspot.com/2008/06/pixar-wall-e-and-rubber-soul.html
Personally I thought the plot was small but appropriately sized, the characters while not exceptionally deep were perfectly engaging and demonstrative in their motivations, and incredibly memorable. In all my first or second favorite Pixar movie.
It was all glitz, with a few "homages" to sci-fi and web fans.
Pretty to look at, but the themes were cliche, the science unbelievable, and the real-life shots were weird and really off-putting.
Anyone putting this in the same group as _Incredibles_ or the _Toy Story_ films is out of it.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Wall-E is an ayahuasca trip. Right after Wall-E finds the vine in the boot (traveling vine) a bunch of explosions right out of Altered States happen. Then we meet a white angel/alien thing right out of psychedelic literature. Then they undergo joseph Campbell's archetypal hero journey, complete with death and rebirth and the experience of the self as an object in the machinations of a higher order self. When wall-e and eve are watching that tree with the root in the vine in the boot, that is much more a symbol about hallucinogen use revealing esoteric mystical secrets and uniting the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality then anything social or ecological.
The movie also works as a drug trip, where the movie is the trip that inspired the director to create the film as social commentary. wall-e is the persona, Eve is Anima, The captain is the soul in charge, the axiom is the engrained pattern of thinking in one person, the ecological stuff is a parable about psychological debris, the earth is the body. When the ship comes to earth, it's the psyche returning to the body, where the director/captain spreads ecological wisdom. The first thing wall-e does when brought back to life after being reprogrammed by the unconscious aspect of personality is make a junk cube with a rubiks cube in it. Then we see that vine and tree. This movie works as social commentary, but it encodes the psychedelic hero's journey. I think this is the deepest meaning of the film.
The movie also works as a commentary of the drug war (as the rogue robots try and keep the plant from auto, which will let the people wake up and be free.)
Those end credits are a rosetta stone to decipher the film. The same forces that we saw as aspects of one personality (in the ayahuasca interpretation) and characters in one film are presented throughout history and as archetypes.
Without reading TFA, anybody got an explanation to the shameful stealing of Johnny Five's design in favour of this movie?
I love the fact that animator Angus MacLane made a WALL-E out of Legos: http://www.brothers-brick.com/2008/06/26/pixar-animator-angus-maclane-builds-best-lego-wall-e-yet-interview/
I love that kind of thing. It shows real talent and eye for visuals.
And here's a Lego Chewbacca just because it's cool: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_33vZjjp9fSQ/RxNKJoOXsWI/AAAAAAAAAY4/owLpXw1jxPU/033.JPG
Health Insurance Quotes
Also, Pixar has gotten so good at what they do that they don't even need words to tell a story. The first 45 minutes of the movie has pretty much ZERO dialogue with the exception of BnL ads for background. Oh, also a word or two (literally) from the robots.
Y'know, I haven't seen the movie, but I really find this to be impossible. Indeed, the lack of dialogue is the single biggest reason I'm not going to see the movie until I, at the very least, pirate it to see if it's any good: stories without dialogue don't work. Period. There's a reason why we quit making silent movies, and it really disappointed me that Pixar is taking a step backward in that regard.
Have you ever seen the old Aeon Flux shorts? Not the TV series, with its sometimes-fun, sometimes-cheesy dialogue laced heavy with sexual innuendo, but the original shorts that preceded that... I've found these to be great examples of the advantage of story-telling without dialogue. Conversely, the TV series is a good example of how dialogue isn't necessarily an improvement. Or, if you've ever played the game "Out of this World" (AKA "Another World") - very nice use of no-dialogue.
Basically, dialogue is a very direct means of telling the story, while a movie without dialogue is more illustrative. It's like instead of the story being told to you, it's demonstrated. If it's done right it can be very effective.
Telling a story with dialogue can be easier (not necessarily, though - you have to be good at dialogue, too) - one of the main limitations of story-telling without dialogue IMO is that anything you want to relate has to happen right there in front of the viewer. With dialogue a character could say, "oh you remember that thing we did last week? Well, I'm pissed at you because of it." Without dialogue you have to show not only that event, but also the reaction to it that makes that character angry.
A story without dialogue can't really be too complex, of course - but the elements of Wall-E that are dialogue-free are mostly the establishment of Wall-E and Eve themselves and their little love story. Trust me, it comes through quite nicely. I think love is something that is better demonstrated than verbalized anyway.
Bow-ties are cool.
You missed the most obvious one: WALL-E went home and before he played an old movie, there was a white iPod (perhaps 1st gen with mechanical scroll wheel, didn't get to see it closely) on its dock.
10.) Wall-E pipes his VCR through an iPod to watch it.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Auto's voice is credited to Macintalk. (Not sure if that's entirely distinct from your point #6, but worth mentioning.)
The autopilot's eye was the same eye used by HAL in 2001: A Space Oddessy
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Damn, forgot to put that one on the list! #^_^#
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Missed the most obvious one...doggone-it!
1.) Wall-E watches Hello, Dolly by piping the input from an old fashioned VHS VCR through an iPod Video, and magnifies the screen with a fresnel lens.
2.) Old Quadra-vintage Mac Chord sound when Wall-E hits full solar charge.
3.) Eve was designed by Jonathan Ive, the creator of many Apple designs.
4.) Eve is made of the same shiny white plastic that has covered Mac products since the first Snow iMac, and the first white iBook.
5.) Eve's reboot sound is reminiscent of the 20th Anniversary Mac sound, the first and last time the sound was used.
6.) Autopilot also looks designed by Apple.
7.) Autopilot's voice is "Ralph," a Mac voice that dates back to the 68K era. The voice is credited as "Macintalk" in the end credits.
8.) Many have pointed out that Wall-E's eyes seem to do the same type of internal adjustments that the iSight did.
9.) The "foreign contaminant" voice that M-O uses is another Mac voice called "Zarvox." Zarvox is also from the same batch that Ralph is from.
10.) The fried card inside Wall-E, and also the cards Eve tries to use to replace it, all look like Apple II expansion cards.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
As I watched the short Presto I couldn't help but imagine a guy at Pixar playing Portal on their lunch break and going "Hey, I've got an idea!"
I though Ratatouille was also very above children and geared more for grown ups then kids. However, the story leaves less of an impact then Wall-E has done.
I mean... they're robots. They don't reproduce (at least not sexually), and have no external genitalia... Why in the hell do they have to have a "FEMALE" robot and a "MALE" robot???
[Probably because if they didn't, right-wingers walking in to the theater with all kinds of assumptions about 'love/marriage' would claim they're gay... LOL]
Huh? You really think that The Incredibles and Finding Nemo can be boiled down to "common memes of road trips, and comedy routines"? Did all the wonderful depth and layered meaning written into those films somehow escape your notice?
I guess there wasn't enough fart and poop jokes. Good thing we still have broad-based family fare like the Chipmunks and Cat in the Hat... My 2 daughters loved Wall-E (3 and 7)
I'm pretty sure that Wall-e keeping his video tapes in an older toaster was a reference to the Amiga Video Toaster, though I've gotten no confirmation of that.
Animaniacs, man... That brought me back to middle school for a few seconds. That really made my day!
I'm really surprised the mods are on the ball and didn't mod you off topic for an undoubtedly obscure reference. Good job mods!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio drama. Speak ill of it and you'll be handing in your geek card! =)
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
All Pixar movies have layered meanings and hidden jokes, WALL-E included. But in 1 or 2 sentences, what are the stories of Finding Nemo and The Incredibles? How are their resolutions compared with Ratatouille and WALL-E?