Brilliant Boys and Their Cool Toys

If there's any anxiety at Pixar about doing an I Am Legend for the junior set,you won't hear it from John Lasster,Pixar's creative director and the inventive mind behind Toy Story,A Bug's life and Car's.He's his usual beaming,cartoon-round,Hawaiian-shirt-wearing self as he waxes rhapsodic about Wall.E and,in passing,confides the secret of the studio's success.The people who work here are doing what they've wanted to do their whole lives.


That would sound like cult-leader talk from anyone else.But a visitor to Pixar HQ in Emeryville,Calif.(Where the upscale cafeteria serves iced tea,not Kool-aid),find a workforce that is able to channel a child's sense of play and wild imagination into the business of CGI moviemaking.The trick, never grow up.Lassester's office shelves groan with hundreds of gewgaws from Pixas films.I love toys,he says unabashedly.A lot of animations love toys.



Toy love-the child's belief that a piece of cloth or a machine can have life,feelings,personality-is at the heart of many Pixar movies,begining with Lasseter's 80's shorts Luxo,Jr(Whose lamp became the i in the company's logo),Red's Dream and Tin Toy,all made to demostrate the possibilities of the infant CGI medium but with the savvy and sentiment of a natural storyteller.Staton says he has seen Luxo,Jr. dozen of times,yet,Miraculously,I get caught up every time,in the wordless story of father and son lamps.Take that 2 min experiment from 1986,and WALL.E is the logical romantic extension,toy meets girl.



And,on a technical level,sight meets sound.WALL.E's animation,especially in scences on Earth,has a photorealistic quality,it looks like a gorgeously arid,live-action waste dump.The appointments of the Axiom,exterior and interior,are as finely detailed as those in any Star Wars or Alien film.Even if the exploits of Wall.E and Eve don't take and break your heart,you'll be impressed by the graphic design.


Add to that the amazing dimension Burtt brought to the film.Signing with Pixar after 28 years at Lucasfilm Ltd,he got this plum of a project,he'd be creating most of Wall.E's sounds,from the hero's voice(Brutt's own,which he stretched,distorted and metallicized on his computer keyboard) to the wind of Wall.E's world 'that's just Niagara Falls' and the sound of the bot driving around It's taken from a tank,but it's made to sound tiny.



Brutt is an audio Audubon.Much of his recording is done on location-in zoos, his driveway or (lots of this in WALL.E) a junkyard,The chirps needed for WALL.E's cockroach companion were provided by a raccoon,speeded up ,and the insect's clicks came from the sound of locking handcuffs.I was recording a policeman's Taser,Burtt recalls,and I said,Let me hear your handcuffs.


Having spent so much time with Geroge Lucars on the Star War series,Burtt is used to demanding directors.But even he was sometimes perplexed by Stanton's requests.Andrew would say,That sound of the motor-could we have one with more pathos?And then I see it as just another challenge and say,O.K. I'll get ya one!


Pixar at its best,invents its own challenges.The typical director worries that most people will see his movie at home,their finger on the fast-forward and stop buttons,so he makes every element instantly understandable.That's why most movies seem as if they were made for the passengers of Axiom.But Wall.E plays without safety nets or spoon-feeding,it reinvents the delicate,potent behavioral language of silent-film comedy,of the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films.


We don't have to contribute to the dreck,Stanton says of the Pixar team.We want to sustain the love of going to movies.After Finding Nemo,I thought, Now is the time to push open the door-to broaden the palette,increase the possibility of what a good movie is in the audience's mind.Will they have to open their receptors?Fine.If they discorver it on their own,They'll enjoy it so much more.Pixar has taken its biggest gamble,but it's moviegoers who'll be the winners.