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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..."
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.
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Well maybe not best movie EVER, but close to it. And I'm someone who's always found Pixar's stuff way overrated.
Whoa, whoa, whoa... You went to a Pixar film not realizing that there would be a short before it? What rock have you been living under?
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The only movie I remember without a short was The Incredibles. But all the others had shorts. I've always like them myself, a tribute to the old movies. Besides if you are going to be that serious then why the heck are you going to a kids movie.
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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!
"The Incredibles" opened with "Boundin'".
Nice animation, but a little too saccharine for me.
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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.
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It was "Cars".
And, in case you haven't seen: they're all here.
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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.
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.
I think you mean Panavision.
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Andrew Stanton explained the use of live action in this USA Today article. For some things like Hello, Dolly there was no real alternative than using the real footage from the film.
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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.
The look of the people in The Incredibles was definitely different than in previous Pixar movies, but they were less about trying to look realistic (which I think was the attempt it Toy Story, where it ends up looking somewhat creepy), and more about making the characters look like action figures. Because hey, they're super heroes. If they wanted to try to make the people really realistic, I'm sure the look would have been vastly different.
And now, in Wall*E, the people (for the most part) have a very cartoony bubbly look, which is obviously intentional to represent how far the human race has degenerated during the time it has been waited on hand and foot by robots in space. The obviousness of that intent is highlighted by the fact that in the line up of photos of all of the previous captains, the first one was very realistic looking, and they gradually get more cartoony and fat from there. Also, all of the videos of Fred Willard are actual videos of the actor, not animations. That serves to further show the contrast between what humans were and what they have become. I think when Toy Story came out, they were focused on showing off this new medium and how realistic it can be, so they tried to even make the people lifelike, which was hard to do. So in subsequent movies, they've avoided the Uncanny Valley by making the humans cartoonish in different ways, depending on the theme of the movie.
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!"