Wall-e Size

[Kum Filteau]

Assome of you know, we've been working on a foamcore mock up for a full-sized Wall-E. We've been fiddling a lot with the sizing; on a whim, I called Pixar, and they actually talked to me! :> I asked one of the publicists how big Wall-E would be "in real life," and she said, "I might actually have that!" She came back a second or two later and said he is 3'4" from the top of his eyes to the ground when he is "standing" normally. She said she had further information if I wanted it (I of course said yes), and she went on to say that he weighs 270 lbs, averages 20 mph with a top speed of 35 mph, and is 7.8 hp. I love that not only do they have that information at hand, but that they're willing to chat with a geek like me on the phone to share it. Yeah Pixar!

First off I would like to thank everyone who enjoyed my last post and all the nice words, I should have given more response on that post, but I don't wanna feel like "pushing my own post up" after a year... Anyway, I finally got time now, so I would probably be more active in posting MOCs, both new ones and those I have not shared before.

This time, I have chosen one that is relatively new, built from last year, during the release of the amazing 21303 official set. I love the official set VERY VERY MUCH, but after all the budget taken by the two Super Heroes lines, there wasn't any left for me to get this adorable pal. Of course, one of the best thing about LEGO, is that you can build whatever you want, so like all the other AFOL would say: Let's build one ourselves!

This is probably one of my favourite MOCs of all times, I am not sure what do you guys think yet, but personally i LOVE the result. My favourite part of the official set, was those realistic eyes of Wall-E, that really give the model a spirit, so that's also where I started.

Then I thought, it wouldn't be as fun if it's just a small rendition of Wall-E that does nothing, after all, this character has been popular among the AFOLs for the past few years and there were already a lot marvelous takes on the characters, in all sort of sizes. Therefore, I decided that the belly must be able to be opened like the big one.

With a single night of hard work, I made this satisfying MOC, the only thing I wished I could have improved, is to include the treads, but I simply don't have the pieces. What do you guys think about it? Comments & Criticism are welcome as usual!

I have always dreamed of stepping inside the walls of Pixar. A week ago that dream came true. Disney invited me out to San Francisco to interview Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Wall-E, at Pixar Studios. I am a true dedicated Pixar fan, from Toy Story all the way to The Incredibles and it's breathtaking to be sitting inside of Pixar with the man who has been a part of some of the greatest films in history. Stanton worked with John Lasseter on A Bug's Life and eventually went on to bring us the wonderful Finding Nemo, easily one of my Pixar favorites (although it's impossible to truly rank them). And now it's a great honor to present my interview with the mind behind Pixar's latest film, Wall-E.

Being inside of Pixar was like being a kid in a candy store. Everywhere you turned, a Pixar memory could be found. There hand-drawn were sketches of Remy from Ratatouille and Wall-E on the walls inches from the ground; concept art, sculptures, and storyboards filled every open square inch in every hallway; life-size figures from Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, and even Finding Nemo welcomed you to the studio. It was a surreal experience but one where I finally got to see where it all happened. Talking with Andrew Stanton to me was much more of an opportunity to talk to someone who had, indirectly, changed my life and inspired me in so many ways - a true honor. It was one of the most unforgettable experiences I've ever had.

I decided to focus my interview not on the obvious questions, but on the more intricate details of Pixar and the development of Wall-E. If you're curious to hear about how Stanton was inspired by binoculars or the basics of the story, you can read our coverage from WonderCon. If you're already familiar with the background story of Wall-E and are curious to hear more, then read on and enjoy!

And then the very next thing we said is nobody will ever let us do it, because we hadn't even proven ourselves as filmmakers, hadn't proven Toy Story yet and it just seemed so out there. But as filmgoers, as geeks, we were like, I would go see a movie like that! So that just stuck up there for a long time and we got completely swept up in all these other movies and so it wasn't until Finding Nemo that I was having to do rewrites, so about 2002, so we're jumping to eight years later, almost a decade later, and I couldn't stop -- so I started thinking about this little guy again, and I said, he's so lonely, it's such a great character, I don't even know what he's called, I don't why we've left Earth...

And I just started to answer all that. I found myself very quickly writing the first act of the movie, which is not that different then what you have here. Then I couldn't stop. Then, I was like, by the time Nemo came out, this is what I want to do next, and I was definitely emboldened by the idea that Nemo was so huge. I mean, I had gone with my gut on so many things on Nemo that seemed iffy and not so sure. The whole time I was working on them here that it kind of threw me for a loop that it went over so well and it gave me a lot of confidence to just stick with my gut. So I said, well, my gut is telling me to do this movie, so I'm going to do it. So it was in 2003 near the end of the year, Nemo was already out, that I was really thinking seriously about design and stuff like that. And I knew the design of him was going to be crucial to how engaging he was and how much you wanted to follow him and how much you wanted to infer personality on him and the big epiphany was definitely late 2003. I was at a baseball game and I got the binoculars and I think the rest is known. So it had a long gestation period, a long time sitting on the stove, simmering.

Stanton: They were receptive to the concept, the idea, but like anybody else, they were a little like, how exactly is that going to work. So I had a lot of leeway because of Nemo. I definitely leveraged off that, because it was so huge, I was sort of like -- this is what I want to do next. And they were like okay. And so I could tell there would be a lot of debate going on about how to do it, not whether we should do it, but how to do it. I didn't want to waste time debating that, so the year that Nemo was out, 2004, people expected me to be on vacation and just slowly research what I may want to do next, so I knew I would be under the radar.

So I actually stayed at work, got three of my favorite board artists and an editor, so I was completely under the radar with nobody paying attention and was able to, without any pressure, just completely free associate how I would want a movie like this to be like. We boarded and put on reels, with scratch voices and stuff like that, the first act, the first 20 minutes of the movie. I figured that I will prove to myself, without any pressure, that I can do something like this and that something like this is possible. If I don't, then I'll just stop and nobody will know and it won't matter, but if I do feel like I've cracked it, then I can just show it to anybody that's skeptical and that will answer it. I won't have to debate it. And that's exactly what happened after about four hard months, we got something that feels very much like what we've watched here and I showed it to John Lasseter and Steve Jobs at the time, who were the biggest guns then, and they said, 'oh, I get it!' And I could tell that when they walked in, they were skeptical. And when they walked out, they weren't, so it worked.

Stanton: I know, and I love the choice, too, and I couldn't explain it at first. I just knew I wanted an old-fashioned song against space, and I just loved the future against the past, but I thought that's millions of songs. Which one do I pick? And so I started going into standards and a lot of standards come from musicals, and that sort of led me to musicals, and I did musical theater as a kid, so I knew a lot of them. I got to Hello, Dolly!, and I was just hittin' songs on iTunes, and you're just hearing the beginnings and I hear 'Out there...' and I loved it! I was like, that just works, I can't even explain, it just works, with the stars and what a great way to kick off the movie. It kind of propels you into it and it was a great juxtaposition to such a dire background. I loved the two together. I thought it really balanced the movie and it really, in a weird way, helped you meet Wall-E before you meet him.

Then when I thought about the song, I said, why do I like this so much and then I realized not only is it catchy and it has this sort of naivet to it, but it's about these two guys that have never left their small town and they want to go out into the big world and kiss a girl. And I thought -- that's Wall-E, that's it! So I started looking at other songs, just to see if there would be any other epiphanies, and I got this huge one from watching the movie and seeing 'It Only Takes a Moment' with the two lovers and when I saw them hold hands, it was like, that's exactly it, that's how we will convey that the phrase 'I love you.' When you get that much back from research, you just take it as fate, you just go -- I know and I'm running with it. I know I will be answering this question for the rest of my life, but it's a price I'm willing to pay because it just works.

The only thing I did that was a little unconventional, is the manner in which I formatted the script. I was very inspired by Dan O'Bannon's script for Alien. His description paragraphs were not your typical paragraphs, they were actually small phrases that were all left justified, almost like a haiku, and they created this rhythm of just being in the moment of quiet and visual. And you found yourself reading the descriptions much more than you normally do a script because of that form, instead of just skipping to the dialogue. It really kind of paced you as a reader and gave you the much more visceral feel of what it will be like to watch that movie. So I used that for Wall-E -- it really helped.

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