"Right now, I'm feeling light as a feather." So says writer-director Andrew Stanton, who has just completed a project that has been in the works for 14 years: WALL-E, the ninth feature film from Pixar Animation Studios. The tale of a lonely little trash-compacting robot takes place some 700 years in the future, but his real story began at a lunch meeting in summer 1994.
Stanton recalls, "The core of Pixar at the time was John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Joe Ranft and myself. We realized we might actually get the chance to make another movie after Toy Story, which we hadn't conceived of, and we realized we were already late if we were going to start developing something. That lunch bore out many ideas, mainly A Bug's Life [but also Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo] .
"One idea was doing an SF film: 'What if humanity had left the Earth, and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?' He was such a lonely character that I loved it. We had been working so hard on Toy Story, trying to make the main character of Woody likable. We spent years getting him just right, so to immediately have empathy for this character seemed like gold. Almost in the same breath, Pete and I said, 'Whoa, it's a robot. We should do it like R2-D2 and not [have him] speak a conventional language.'
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