WALL-E: Pixar’s famous robot was inspired by a movie legend

Tom Cruise’s look in Aladdin’s eyes, Dwayne Johnson’s smile on Maui’s face, Alyssa Milano’s facial expression in the painting of the Little Mermaid or Robin Williams’ performance, immersed in various expressions of genius. ..

Since the inception of the famous Disney studios, it has been common for the company’s animators (later imitators of Pixar) to take direct inspiration from real-life actors or actresses to bring the characters of their feature films to life.

A Chaplin film a day for a year and a half

So it was in the mid-2000s, when director Andrew Stanton and his teams tried to take on a unique challenge – animating a small robot without a single line of dialogue – their reflex was to draw inspiration from the greatest legends. silent cinema.

“We told ourselves that we should look at the masters because these people have had decades to become great storytellers without relying on dialogue.told Andrew Stanton in 2008 at the microphone AV Club.

So we watched a Charlie Chaplin movie, a Buster Keaton movie, and the occasional Harold Lloyd movie every day at lunch for almost a year and a half with the writing and animating teams. And we got acquainted with their works. “

39 minutes without dialogue

Indeed, like silent film masterpieces like Les Temps Modernes or Le Mécano de la Générale (and aside from a few recorded messages or robot noises), WALL-E is completely devoid of dialogue for its first 39 minutes.

And even if we can hear people talking for the rest of the movie, the little robot hero of the Pixar feature only expresses himself (pretty much) by saying his name and that of his loved one. A limitation that forced the film’s animators to compete in ingenuity and therefore take inspiration from the greatest.

“People have become lazy.”

“We’ve stopped asking ourselves what we can’t tell visually”Andrew Stanton explained, evoking Chaplin and Keaton again.

“These guys just … everything seemed possible. And we realized how much of that staging and work was lost when the voice came out. People get lazy and just rely on dialogue to figure things out.”

If WALL-E’s movements were inspired by the great actors of silent films, the sounds made by the little robot were created by another legend… the sound, this time: the legendary sound engineer Ben Barth, who especially created all the sound effects. For the Star Wars saga.

(Re)discover all the hidden details of ‘WALL-E’…