WALL-E (stylized with an interpunct as WALL·E is a 2008 American animated science fiction film directed by Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Reardon, based on a story by Stanton and Pete Docter. Produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures, the film stars the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver, with Fred Willard in a live-action role. The film follows a solitary robot named WALL-E on a future, uninhabitable, deserted Earth in 2805, left to clean up garbage. He is visited by a robot called EVE sent from the starship Axiom, with whom he falls in love and pursues across the galaxy.
After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt Pixar had created believable simulations of underwater physics and was willing to direct a film set largely in space. WALL-E has minimal dialogue in its early sequences; many of the characters in the film do not have voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds that were designed by Burtt. The film incorporates various topics including human environmental impact and concerns, global catastrophic risk, consumerism, corporatocracy, waste management, obesity/sedentary lifestyles, and nostalgia. It is also Pixar's first animated film featuring live-action segments. Thomas Newman composed the film's musical score. The film cost $180 million to produce, a record-breaking sum for an animated film at the time.
WALL-E premiered at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on June 23, 2008, and was released in the United States on June 27. The film received widespread acclaim for its animation, characters, themes, visuals, score, sound design, screenplay and use of minimal dialogue. It was also commercially successful, grossing $532 million worldwide and becoming the ninth-highest grossing film of 2008. It won several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature alongside five additional nominations. The film was widely named by critics and organizations, including the American Film Institute and National Board of Review, as one of the best films of 2008 and among the greatest animated films ever made. In 2021, WALL-E was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
In the year 2805, Earth is an inhospitable, garbage-strewn wasteland due to an ecocide caused by rampant consumerism, corporate greed, and environmental neglect. Humanity was evacuated to space by the megacorporation Buy n Large on giant spaceships 700 years earlier, leaving trash-compacting "WALL-E" robots to clean up the planet, but the cleanup was eventually abandoned after the planet became far too toxic. All but one of the robots have stopped functioning; the last remaining active WALL-E has developed a personality and uses a truck designed to carry the WALL-E robots as a home. WALL-E remains active by salvaging parts from other inactive robots, with his pet cockroach Hal as his only companion.
One day, WALL-E's routine of compressing trash and collecting interesting objects is broken by the arrival of a sleek, futuristic robot called EVE, who scans the planet for sustainable life. WALL-E is smitten by her, and the two begin to connect until EVE goes into standby mode when WALL-E shows her his most recent find: a living seedling. WALL-E cares for EVE until she is collected by a large unmanned rocket; with WALL-E clinging on, it returns to its mothership, the starliner Axiom.
In the centuries since the Axiom left Earth, its passengers have degenerated into helpless obesity due to laziness, using hoverchairs and robots catering to their every whim. Captain B. McCrea sits back while his robotic AI autopilot helm, nicknamed AUTO, pilots the ship. McCrea is unprepared for the positive probe response, but discovers that placing the plant in the ship's Holo-Detector will trigger a hyperjump back to Earth so that humanity can begin recolonization. When McCrea inspects EVE's storage compartment, the plant is missing, and EVE blames WALL-E for its disappearance.
EVE is deemed faulty and taken to diagnostics. Mistaking this for torture, WALL-E intervenes and inadvertently releases the other faulty bots, causing him and EVE to be designated rogue robots. Frustrated with WALL-E's reckless actions, EVE tries sending WALL-E home in an escape pod, but as WALL-E refuses, the two witness McCrea's first mate robot, GO-4, stowing the plant in a pod set to self-destruct, proving WALL-E's innocence. WALL-E enters the pod to retrieve the plant just as it launches, and he and the plant survive the pod's destruction. EVE catches up to him and they reconcile, dancing in space around the Axiom.
EVE brings the plant to McCrea, who watches her recordings of Earth, concluding that they must save it, and EVE is touched by seeing recordings of WALL-E caring for her while she was in standby mode, understanding his feelings for her. AUTO reveals his secret no-return directive A113, recorded by Shelby Forthright, Buy n Large's CEO, in 2110, which orders them not to return to Earth on account of its toxicity levels, unaware that the planet is actually starting to recover; AUTO had ordered GO-4 to get rid of the plant earlier. When McCrea tries overriding the directive, AUTO mutinies and electrocutes WALL-E, throws him and EVE down a garbage chute, and confines McCrea to his quarters. EVE and WALL-E are nearly ejected into space with the Axiom garbage, but a cleaning robot named M-O inadvertently jams the airlock and rescues them.
McCrea escapes by tricking AUTO with an image of the plant and fights for control of the Axiom, destroying GO-4 in the process, while humans and robots work to secure the real plant. AUTO crushes WALL-E using the Holo-Detector, but McCrea rises from his chair, activates the manual override and deactivates AUTO. EVE inserts the plant into the Holo-Detector, initiating the hyperjump back to Earth. Arriving on Earth, EVE repairs WALL-E, but his memory and personality have been erased. Heartbroken, EVE gives WALL-E a "smooch", which releases a static electricity shock, restoring him. WALL-E and EVE reunite as the Axiom inhabitants take their first steps on Earth. Humans and robots work to restore the ravaged planet with the help of WALL-E and EVE, and the plant grows into a tree, which WALL-E and EVE admire together.
Cast Voice cast Ben Burtt as: WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class), a compactor robot who has achieved sentience, and is the only one still functioning on Earth. He is a small mobile compactor box accompanied by his cockroach friend Hal. He collects trinkets from the garbage and displays them at his home, where he watches a video cassette of 20th Century Fox's Hello, Dolly!, mimicking the dance sequences. M-O (Microbe-Obliterator), a cleaning robot. Elissa Knight as EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a glossy white egg-shaped probe robot with blue LED eyes, whose directive is to verify the habitability of planets for humans. She moves using antigravity and is equipped with scanners, specimen storage, and a cannon which she is quick to use. Jeff Garlin as Captain B. McCrea, the captain of the Axiom. While McCrea's name was never spoken, it does appear on a portrait of him in his quarters. He is only ever referred to as the Captain. MacInTalk, the text-to-speech program for Apple Macintosh computers, is the voice of AUTO, the Axioms rogue AI autopilot which handles command functions of the ship. Loyal only to directive A113, he and GO-4 are the only computers not influenced by WALL-E. John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy as John and Mary, who live on the Axiom, so dependent on their automatic services as to be oblivious to their surroundings. They are brought out of their trances by encounters with WALL-E and fall in love with each other. Sigourney Weaver as the Axioms computer. Stanton joked to Weaver: "You realize you get to be 'Mother' now?"DVD. Scene 16. "Captain on Deck". Audio commentary by Director Andrew Stanton. 52:01–52:09. referring to the ship's computer in the film Alien, starring Weaver.
Live-action cast Fred Willard as Shelby Forthright, the CEO of the Buy n Large Corporation and the President of Earth. He is the only major live-action character, appearing only in videos recorded around the time of the Axioms launch in the 22nd century. Forthright proposed the plan to evacuate Earth's population and then clean up the planet so they could return within five years. Discovering that Earth had become too toxic to support life, the cleanup and recolonization were abandoned. Forthright issued directive A113 where the auto-pilots are ordered to prevent anyone from returning to Earth. To date, Forthright is the only live-action character with a speaking role in any Pixar film. Michael Crawford and Marianne McAndrew appear in an archival recording performing "It Only Takes a Moment" from Hello, Dolly!.
Production Writing
As depicted in the teaser trailer, Andrew Stanton conceived WALL-E during a lunch with fellow writers John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft in 1994. Toy Story was near completion and the writers brainstormed ideas for their next projects—A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo—at this lunch. Stanton asked, "What if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?" Having struggled for many years with making the characters in Toy Story appealing, Stanton found his simple Robinson Crusoe-esque idea of a lonely robot on a deserted planet strong. Stanton made WALL-E a waste collector as the idea was instantly understandable, and because it was a low-status menial job that made him sympathetic. Stanton also liked the imagery of stacked cubes of garbage. He did not find the idea dark because having a planet covered in garbage was for him a childish imagining of disaster.
Stanton and Docter spent two months developing Trash Planet in 1995 but abandoned it due to story issues, with Docter pivoting to direct Monsters, Inc..Hauser, p. 11. Stanton came up with the idea of WALL-E finding a plant, because his life as the sole inhabitant on a deserted world reminded Stanton of a plant growing among pavements. Before they turned their attention to other projects, Stanton and Lasseter thought about having WALL-E fall in love, as it was the necessary progression away from loneliness. Stanton started writing WALL-E again in 2002 while completing Finding Nemo. Stanton formatted his script in a manner reminiscent of Dan O'Bannon's Alien. O'Bannon wrote his script in a manner Stanton found reminded him of haiku, where visual descriptions were done in continuous lines of a few words. Stanton wrote his robot "dialogue" conventionally, but placed them in brackets. In late 2003, Stanton and a few others created a story reel of the first twenty minutes of the film. Lasseter and Steve Jobs were impressed and officially began development, though Jobs stated he did not like the title, originally spelled "W.A.L.-E."Title Animation Test, 2008 DVD, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment