Here's Wall-E, the best animated film of the year and arguably Pixar's greatest cinematic achievement yet. TimeOut talked to those behind the little metal guy with a big message
KEY POINTS:
Andrew Stanton is the guy who made Finding Nemo.
Great Barrier Reef resident Nemo, was found, of course, in an aquarium in a dentist's surgery on Sydney Harbour, above which is a hotel in which Stanton is now sitting.
"You know it would be on that side because he had a view of the Opera House," the director laughs about revisiting the scene of his previous animated triumph.
Nemo stands as animation giant Pixar's biggest box office performer. It grossed US$865 million (NZ$1.3 billion) of the US$4.3 billion generated by the company's first eight animated features.
That success, says Stanton, gave him the leverage to do Wall-E.
It's the third film the 42-year-old Stanton has directed for Pixar (he co-helmed A Bug's Life and has screenplay credits for most of the other Pixar hits).
But where Nemo was definitely a cartoon - bright colours, funny voices, simple father-son sentiments, cute fish - Wall-E is quite something else.
It's a largely dialogue-free, post-apocalyptic tale of the last robot on Earth after humankind has evacuated and left the place a real mess, which the solar-powered little guy has just kept on cleaning up for hundreds of years.
His only friend is a cockroach. He divides his leisure hours between sorting out his collection of interesting stuff he's found and watching a VHS tape of Hello Dolly!
That's until he gets a visitor named Eve... .
If Wall-E looks like a battered Tonka toy with binocular eyes, she's a sleek hovering bot who looks like she was designed by Apple.
So a sci-fi eco-themed romantic comedy between two androids, then.
It might seem like Pixar's greatest leap into the unknown, but after its release in the northern hemisphere, Wall-E is shaping up as the best reviewed movie of the year.
It's heading towards US$300 million, which is relatively modest by Pixar standards but still better than Stanton thought it might.
"Not that I had low expectations. But I had no illusions after Nemo that I probably would never experience something like that again. I never expected Nemo to be so huge.
"I know Wall-E was so outside of the box, and I leveraged off the success of Nemo to get the OK to do this, that I lowered my expectations from that.
"I just wanted it to do well enough that I get the chance to do it again."
The story of Wall-E has its origins in the mid 90s, when Stanton was at a historic lunch with his fellow Pixar boffins as Toy Story was shaping up to be the company's first hit.
Across the table came the ideas for the movies which would become A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc. - and a kernel of an idea for a movie about the last robot on earth.
The idea that he was left as a lonely janitor came later.
But Stanton says he wasn't trying to make a big ecological statement or say anything about where technology is leading us - the chubby remnants of mankind live on a cruise-liner spaceship where every their whim is catered to.
"It fell from the skies with this one sentence right from the get go which was: 'What if everybody left Earth and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?' Right there it's a bleak situation but what didn't interest me was the societal issue of it. What interested me was the loneliest character I could have ever imagined. So it was always character-driven. I don't look at the world from a political or academic standpoint, I am not that smart... I am driven completely by emotion and relationships. So everything was reverse-engineered.
"So if I had any message, it was just that this character was asking 'what is the point of living?' and it's to love.
"If you look at it in those eyes it all makes sense. It's not a pile of mini political messages to check off. I would hate a movie like that. I think any good storyteller has one message."
Still, everything that surrounds Wall-E makes it a more challenging film than previous Pixar fare - so maybe it's pitching itself above the heads of kids.
"It was a 50-50 split between people who assumed it was just for kids because of the nature of it - there is very little conventional dialogue. And the other 50 per cent thought it was only for adults.
"So it's almost more of a person asking the question. I have never asked that question. I have complete faith in kids - they understand way more than people will ever give them credit for. They spend most of their youth trying to figure out stuff they don't understand so their muscles are pretty honed. If I have any worries, it's that the adults have become complacent and don't want to be challenged."
There's a slight exasperation in Stanton's voice when some of the quirks of the film - the use of Hello Dolly! songs, the Thomas Newman soundtrack, how it was computer animated to make it look like it was filmed on a movie camera, its allusions to Kubrick's 2001 - come up for discussion.
Those, he says, were all his choices as director. Pixar may be the illustrious animation studio but its films are still the works of directors and artists, not software or committees.
"There is something about animation, at least in my adulthood, where almost by default people think it's made by committee. People assume it's made by corporate heads, that it is a product of a company and nobody assumes that about a live action film.
"There is a director with a vision and his quirky tastes and opinions and ways he looks at the world would be expected to be an asset of that. So if I have to go that quirky and that outside the box to remind you that this is not made by a company, by a committee, by a machine by a factory, it's made by artists, then so be it."
LOWDOWN
What: Wall-E, Pixar's ninth animated feature, a tale of a lonely robot and how falling in love means going into orbit
When & where: Opens at cinemas on September 18
