WALL·E: Beep, whistle – smash

A tale of robot-love with almost no dialogue could be a hit of Toy Story proportions, says John Hiscock.

Fourteen years ago in California, a group of young animators working on Toy Story – the first entirely computer-generated feature film – gathered round a table to eat sandwiches and toss about ideas for a follow-up project. From that, now legendary, lunchtime came the concepts for A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo: all huge successes for the fledgling Pixar studio. One further idea from the meeting never saw the light of day – until now.

WALL·E, the ninth, and riskiest, Pixar project yet, is an almost dialogue-free love story set in the future, about a lonely, rubbish-compacting robot who lives on an abandoned, heavily polluted Earth, and a sleek droid from outer space named EVE.

“I came up with the character of WALL·E and he just sort of sat around for a long time,” says Andrew Stanton, the Oscar-winning writer-director of Finding Nemo, and co-writer of Toy Story. “It took the success of Finding Nemo [which grossed almost $865 million worldwide] for us to decide that the time was right for WALL·E.”

WALL·E and EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) communicate only with beeps and whistles; the sole dialogue in the movie is between the obese human characters who have abandoned Earth and are on a permanent orbital cruise aboard a luxury spaceship.

“It’s the first story I’ve worked on at Pixar where we had a character first,” says Stanton. “When I started writing it, I didn’t know what it would be about. I just knew the character was alone on the planet, doing the same thing for 700 years. I thought that was so sad that I had to give him a relationship and make it a love story.”

WALL·E took four years to make, cost nearly £100 million and manages to combine an endearing, child-friendly main character with a strong environmentalist message and an enchanting storyline.

Some critics have suggested that an animated movie about mankind’s over-reliance on technology in which the lead characters are essentially mimes, may be too advanced for the young audiences who have made Pixar’s previous films such successes. Stanton disagrees. “I don’t think the kids are going to have a problem with it at all,” he says. “It’s the adults I worry about. They’re lazy, they’re tired and they don’t want to figure things out any more.”

Reminiscent of ET and R2-D2, there is something poignant about WALL·E and the way he conscientiously goes about his lonely task, bulldozing, scooping and compacting the towering piles of rubbish left behind by humans while at the same time salvaging various trinkets that appeal to him. One of the items that he stacks on his shelves is a plant which becomes the plot’s focal point – the McGuffin, as Hitchcock would have called it.

His life changes when EVE arrives on Earth on a mission to scout for any signs of life, and homes in on the potplant. WALL·E falls instantly in love with the svelte alien.

Stanton and his team watched Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies daily for a year to fully grasp the technique of conveying a message without dialogue. “We came away with the realisation that we didn’t actually gain anything with sound,” he says. “There’s almost nothing you can’t convey and communicate silently.”

Having taken $63 million in its opening weekend in the US, and poised to open worldwide, WALL·E shows every sign of becoming Pixar’s ninth consecutive international smash. Proof, perhaps, that silence really can be golden.