Did You Know? - Fun Facts About "WALL-E"

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. This series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

Y'all remember WALL-E?

I remember going to see WALL-E in theaters twice. It's definitely one of PIXAR's best, with an environmental message that isn't too preachy, fantastic animation, and a cast of charming characters - a good chunk of whom don't really talk! If you haven't seen it already, it's on Disney Plus. Go watch it right now. I'll wait.

Are you back? Great movie, huh? For today's edition of "Did You Know?", I thought it'd be fun to share a few things about WALL-E that you might not have known. After all, you don't really see people talk much about the movie nowadays - it's mostly lumped in with everything pre-Cars 2 as the GOOD stuff that PIXAR's done, whereas everything post-Cars 2 (with some exceptions) is dubbed the BAD stuff that PIXAR has done. If this blog post can get people to start talking about the movie again, well, I've done my part to shed light on this rarely talked about PIXAR classic.

1) The original pitch for WALL-E was thought up by Pete Docter. His idea was kind of like National Lampoon, with a family of aliens visiting a planet where they were driven crazy by a tiny robot. John Lasseter nixed the idea, but something about the premise of a lone, tiny robot on a planet covered with trash stuck with Andrew Stanton...

Concept art for WALL-E himself.

2) While designing WALL-E himself, Andrew Stanton was insistent that the character should have his own body language, having him constrained by the boundaries of his design - lead character animator Angus MacLane described this as avoiding "dude-in-a-suit or Fozzie Bear acting" and "use a more minimal sense of acting" instead of "having a robot that was puppet-y and moves around a lot". Andrew didn't want WALL-E to at any point pose like a human. He set a "no elbows" rule, since WALL-E was built to pull trash into his belly, which doesn't exactly require elbows, ergo it wouldn't make much sense for him to have them. This made it difficult to figure out how WALL-E could reach the buttons on his trash compactor chest if his arms didn't bend. They considered flexible Dr. Octopus-style arms or limbs that telescoped like a car antennae, then Angus was inspired by his father's job of designing inkjet printers, which use a slide-like mechanism. Having WALL-E's shoulder move along an L-shaped track allowed the animators to subtly tweak the character's posture.

WALL-E's iconic "binocular eyes" came about when somebody handed Andrew Stanton a pair of binoculars at a baseball game. He said, "There's no nose, there's no mouth, there's nothing and it's not trying to be a face. It just happens to ask that of me when I look at it and I said, 'That's it!' I can't improve upon that. So that's why I ran with that." According to Angus, "It's hard for him to be mad. When his binoculars lock together, that forms a straight line across the top of his head, and at most he looks irritated."

More concept art for WALL-E.

3) Obviously, EVE is designed much differently from WALL-E, and it's not a coincidence that she looks like something Apple might have a hand in. Angus MacLane described her as "a bit like a matryoshka doll, in that she starts out like this impenetrable egg, and then she unfolds to be a bit more vulnerable, but functional. She looks dangly and wind-chimney when she's in automaton mode, but when she gets emotional, she does more arcs, like a porpoise flying."

"WALL-E represents the notion of who people actually are," Angus added. "The guy has dreams, and he has chores, he's not the best at everything he does, but he's good at his job. Just as a superhero team would have a bruiser character, that would be WALL-E, whereas EVE is a much more aggressive hero."

Jim Reardon, the head of story, says, "What we didn't want to do on this film was draw human-looking robots with arms, legs, heads and eyes, and have them talk. We wanted to take objects that you wouldn't normally associate with having humanlike characteristics and see what you could get out of them through design and animation."

"One of the nice things is, because they got designed together, we could really play the opposites," Andrew Stanton claimed. "You could play WALL-E as a box... and EVE as a circle. I remember going, a long time ago, probably 1993, to Peter Gabriel's 'Secret World Tour', and he designed the stage so that one side was about the male and the other side was about the female. And one side was square, and the other stage was circular. And I always thought that was fascinating... and he sort of decided which songs would be played whether they were a female song or a male song in their feel on either of the stages, and I never forgot that iconography. And that really did kind of influence, a bit, the fundamental nature of each of these characters... the other thing was that, just the design, we really wanted to be able to play with both spectrums of robotics: really high-end technology and really low technology. So, WALL-E, I always call a tractor, EVE, I always call sort of like a Porsche. She's the highest, most expensive, no expense spared kind of project that the Buy 'n' Large corporation could use to make a probe droid... WALL-E is much more 'nuts and bolts' and you can kind of get how he works from afar."

Concept art for EVE.

4) WALL-E is voiced by the film's sound designer, Ben Burtt. Ben gathered sounds to use in the movie from the real world with a microphone and recorder because, in his words, "When you use sounds gathered in the outside world, and you bring them into a science fiction film, you get a credibility of those sounds to sell the audience the reality of what's really just a very fantastic world."

The sound of the winds on Earth is made from recordings of Niagara Falls - except for the wind sounds heard inside WALL-E's trailer during the toxic waste storm, which were created by dragging a canvas bag across a carpeted floor. A thunder sheet was used to create the sounds of the spaceship taking off. The noise that WALL-E's little cockroach buddy makes when he moves was created by handcuffs. WALL-E's eyebrow movements are accompanied by the sound of a Nikon camera shutter, whereas his sneezes are Ben Burtt sneezing while a vacuum cleaner is running. He created a library of 2400 sounds for the movie, the largest number of all the films he's worked on thus far.

5) While WALL-E doesn't talk much, Andrew Stanton claimed, "I didn't want to do a silent picture. I wanted to do a picture that really played with the integrity of the character that it was, which was a machine. And I wanted it to feel like a machine because I was so smitten with the character of Luxo Jr. before I ever came to PIXAR and I just loved how every ounce of you saw it as an appliance and then you imbued a character on it, which is a lot more impressive and engaging than seeing something that is designed to be a character and trying to make you throw that on it."

Concept art for M-O.

6) EVE's voice actress is PIXAR employee Elissa Knight. Andrew Stanton called her in to do a scratch track, and he liked her performance so much that he decided to just use her as EVE in the movie instead of getting another actress.

7) "WALL-E", for those wondering, stands for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class". The gigantic robots seen in the garbage disposal on the Axiom are called WALL-As - which stands for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter Axiom Class". EVE, meanwhile, stands for "Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator".

Concept art for the Axiom.

8) Why is there live action footage in the movie? Andrew Stanton, again, provides the answer - practical reasons. "Once I knew that one of the objects I wanted WALL-E to find would be an old musical, and we would be looking at actual footage, I said 'Well, he's going to be looking at live action people, that sets a precedent.' Now, any time I have him looking at real people, at footage from the past of any humans it should be the same world, so I made them live action humans." He felt he could get away with having the humans WALL-E actually encounters on the Axiom be animated because humans could have just evolved since then (and it would've probably been time-consuming to go all Roger Rabbit and have live action humans interacting with animated robots).

And why have Hello, Dolly be the movie that WALL-E loves so much? Andrew claimed, "It's one of those things, I did it out of pure, unconscious abstraction at first. I just, sort of like an artist sticking two colors together and going, wow, I wonder why that works. I knew I wanted old fashioned against the future and I loved the idea of some sort of old-fashioned music playing against the stars. And there was something about that, I just loved the juxtaposition, and then I started searching around for what the song would be." He took a listen to "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", and decided it would work (and it did... that first scene where we see outer space and hear "Out there... there's a world outside of Yonkers..." always stuck in my mind since I saw the movie). Then Andrew thought some more about what the song was about, and he realized that its being about two guys who want to go into the big city, experience life, and kiss a girl has "such a simple innocence to it that almost is WALL-E." After that, he listened to the other songs and found "It Only Takes a Moment". "Suddenly I realized how powerful these songs could be to convey story and push story along for me. Particularly the idea of holding hands, because I have two characters who can't say 'I love you', they have to find some other way to express it, and holding hands is one of the most intimate things you can do in public with somebody in many cultures, and I thought that was just a perfect way to convey that over the course of the movie, so then I was hooked," Andrew said. Ironically, WALL-E's music was composed by Thomas Newman, who is the nephew of Hello, Dolly's co-scorer Lionel Newman.

9) Before settling on Hello, Dolly songs, Andrew's initial idea was to have French swing music in the movie. He decided against it after the release of 2003's The Triplets of Belleville, which also featured French swing music, and was beaten by Andrew's previously-directed PIXAR film Finding Nemo for the Best Animated Feature Academy Award - Andrew didn't want people to think he was copying that movie.

10) To learn how to tell a story purely through visuals, the filmmakers watched Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies during their lunch hours. In just eighteen months, they'd managed to watch every single movie starring them.

Insert joke about WALL-E being a hoarder here.

11) For a while, the movie didn't have humans in it, but rather ALIENS (that pigeon from Bolt would approve). These aliens were boneless, gelatinous blobs with their own language and a giant castle at the back of the Axiom, who treated the robots shabbily, which apparently led to WALL-E starting a robot uprising. There was a twist - eventually, it would have turned out that the gelatinous blobs are what humans evolved into.

How did they come up with this idea? According to Andrew Stanton, the filmmakers consulted with a NASA scientist who told them that the reason why they haven't sent a human being to Mars is because if they did, disuse atrophy would kick in at some point - the lack of gravity would result in that human being losing a large percentage of their bones. Andrew thought that would be a perfect thing for people who've become dependent on technology doing everything for them (like the people on the Axiom) to deal with. The reason why they scrapped this idea is because Andrew eventually decided it was too bizarre, and it distanced the audience from the story emotionally. So instead they made the humans giant babies, which I personally think was the right choice over JELL-O aliens.

Incidentally, I fear that with how dependent on technology we've all become, eventually the human race IS going to end up like the humans in WALL-E - fat, lazy idiots who do nothing but sit in flying chairs and have fancy machinery do everything for them. That probably sounds irrational to you, but my fears are generally pretty irrational...

Concept art for the aliens.

12) WALL-E's little cockroach buddy is named Hal. This is a reference to both 1920s film producer Hal Roach and the computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (who was also the inspiration for AUTO). The painter robot that WALL-E meets among the robots in need of repair is named VN-GO, after painter Vincent Van Gough. Also, rumor has it that WALL-E himself is named after Walter Elias Disney, but I can't find official confirmation on that.

13) Remember the scene where the Captain is staring at portraits of past Axiom captains? The names of those past captains were taken from writers who worked at PIXAR, and their appearances are caricatures of those very writers (for example, Captain Thompson is named after Derek Thompson, a PIXAR story artist).

14) Andrew Stanton wanted the movie to look as though it was filmed on actual cameras. So he advised the animators to make the focus pulls look real and added lens flares and other camera imperfections. Cinematographer Roger Deakins was brought in as a consultant.

I have no idea what THIS is supposed to be concept art for... maybe the trailer
where WALL-E lives?

15) Early in development, the film was to be called "Trash Planet".

16) Andrew Stanton was determined not do "Disneyfy" Hal. "I took it as a challenge: 'Come on! We can make a cute cockroach! And without the aid of little gloves,'" he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "And you can. You can make almost anything cute, if you try hard enough."

17) Yes, there are indeed references to other PIXAR movies in the movie. Among the things WALL-E has in his collection are toys of Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. and Rex from Toy Story. There's also a piggy bank that may or may not be Hamm. Crush from Finding Nemo appears as well, during the end credits.

Rex is in between the bowling pins.

Speaking of Toy Story, you probably already know that the Pizza Planet Truck is one of the things EVE scans while looking for the plant. But you might not have spotted Skinner's scooter from Ratatouille and some orange traffic cones from Toy Story 2 among the trash, or Luxo Jr. among the things that WALL-E uses to make a statue of EVE, or Carl from Up's walking cane among the things in WALL-E's trailer, or a billboard for Eggman Movers, the same moving company Andy's family used in Toy Story, among the Buy 'n' Large ads. Oh, and those little mouse robots crawling on EVE in the trash compactor? They're called REM-Es, another Ratatouille reference.

Are there any references to non-PIXAR Disney movies? Well, there's a genie's lamp in WALL-E's collection as well. This could be a reference to Aladdin.

You can see the lamp and the piggy bank that may or may not be Hamm in this screencap.

18) AUTO was initially an independently-moving robot as opposed to a sentient steering wheel (similar to EVE, but with a more sinister look). There was a scene where he secretly goes to the databanks of the ship and we'd find out what his agenda was before the other characters did - Andrew Stanton described it as "a very funny scene that was sort of Get Smart of going through these secret doors and stuff and he goes down this long shaft and he has to give this eye scan, in the middle of the shaft, to get the ID to go into this bank, and he leans and his visor just goes tumbling all the way down the shaft." It turned out to not be that interesting.

Andrew Stanton said, "The one character that I did want to have speak, besides WALL-E and EVE having sort of limited skills in saying a single word and phrases, was AUTO. I really wanted AUTO to be the extreme end of programming... which would be a character that, you know, is about as soulless and as zeroes and ones and binary and cold as you could make it." He is "voiced" by the Apple computers' "MacTalk" program, which Andrew thought would be perfect for AUTO because of how monotone and soulless it sounds.

19) I found out about this one from Reddit - if you look closely during the scene where WALL-E is struck by lightning, the electricity charges WALL-E's battery back to full.

20) Production designer Ralph Eggleston was inspired by NASA paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as concept art for Disneyland's Tomorrowland. The PIXAR animation team also made field trips to recycling stations to watch giant trash crushers and other machinery at work.

"The Lorax tried to warn us about this..."

21) Andrew Stanton was thrilled to collaborate with Peter Gabriel for the song "Down to Earth" that plays during the credits. "Working with Peter has been one of the biggest highlights of my professional career," he claimed. "When it came to the ending for our film, I knew that we needed to add some additional story points and create something with a global feel to it. And it suddenly dawned on me that Peter is the father of world music to much of the Western world. I got completely seduced with the idea of putting him and Tom in a room together and seeing what they could come up with. Tom went to London to jam with Peter, and it was like this whirlwind romance. Suddenly, there was this amazing Thomas Newman/Peter Gabriel song called 'Down to Earth' that is just beyond my wildest dreams. Peter's lyrics are so deceivingly simple, but they're spot on. I was so moved when I heard the lyrics, because they were so clever and fit so well. They felt completely indicative of Peter Gabriel, and knowing that it was based on the story I had written and that I had any association whatsoever with, it really blew my mind."

22) Andrew always thought of WALL-E as sort of like a beachcomber, a character that "collected things because he didn't understand what the world was before humanity left". Apparently, it was easy for the folks at PIXAR to think of things for WALL-E to collect - things that would probably fascinate and spark curiosity in a child, but would also "read" very easily onscreen. "I'd say for every one item you actually see in [WALL-E's] truck, there's probably twenty-five to thirty that you never get appreciated... all those shelves truly rotate, they all have different items in each one of them, they all have a little bit of a story behind them," he says in the film's audio commentary on the DVD. Also, the fact that it's a truck was based on the folks at PIXAR's love of Tonka trucks.

23) The sound that WALL-E makes when he's fully charged is the same sound a Macintosh computer makes when it starts up. This could be a reference to how PIXAR and Apple share a co-founder, Steve Jobs. Incidentally, you can hear the same sound in Cars 3 at one point.

Concept art for the interior of the Axiom.

24) The part where the Captain plays with the model of the Axiom and the globe was ad-libbed by Jeff Garlin. This was Jeff's first role in a PIXAR movie - after this, he voiced Buttercup the unicorn in Toy Story 3 and Otis, a car that Mater helps near the beginning of Cars 2.

"Because you're reading into everything, because you don't know what's happened to humanity in seven-hundred years, you don't know what the rules are," Andrew explained, "We found that whenever we played something almost sort of Homer Simpson-esque, people would just assume 'Okay, humanity got dumb. Humanity got really dumb.' And people would not like humanity, or especially the captain representing humanity. So we finally decided to stop doing things like that, and learned how to make [the Captain] just come across as tired, but still very vocal... just unmotivated at first, and it really opened our eyes to how we should be playing the Captain."

25) Y'know that one robot typing on a keyboard? The keyboard consists entirely of ones and zeroes. This is a reference to the binary code of ones and zeroes that technology is made from.

26) The first two humans you see on the Axiom are voiced by Andrew Stanton and Jeff Pidgeon. They were roommates in college, so they thought it'd be natural for them to voice characters having a conversation that goes like this: "What do you wanna do?" "I dunno, what do YOU wanna do?".

As Andrew put it, "We just thought we'd have to fall into old habits to have that discussion."

27) The use of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" when the Captain actually stands up and starts walking was initially just a joke. Then the filmmakers saw test audiences going wild - one member was actually punching the air triumphantly. So they kept it in.

There's a good chance you saw one of these standing in your local movie theater.

28) So where exactly does WALL-E live? I mean, aside from "on Earth, ga-doy". Somebody on Quora.com named Shawn Hoffman did some research and deduced that, since there's at least one nuclear power plant and a wind farm, plus WALL-E's truck sits on the interstate overlooking a large waterway, the spot on Earth where WALL-E lives is somewhere in the eastern seaboard, somewhere around the Carolinas. Somebody else suggested Philadelphia. Another common guess is New York City.

29) Originally, the film just had EVE repair WALL-E and presto, he's back to normal. There was a joke where he noticed a giant hole in the roof of his truck and was confused by it, then EVE blocked his view of it. But the filmmakers realized, that wasn't very dramatic - he's a machine, of COURSE they'd be able to repair WALL-E, why should anybody be worried when he's damaged? So they came up with the "WALL-E initially doesn't remember anything other than his directive of making trash cubes" thing to add a bit more to the ending.

30) To promote the movie, Walt Disney Imagineering built an animatronic of WALL-E, planning to have it roam the Disney theme parks at some point. It showed up in places like the Philadelphia Science Museum, the Franklin Institute, and a D23 expo, but never made it to the parks because there were concerns he could run over somebody's foot. A fan of the film has made his own WALL-E animatronic as well:

31) Here's another fun fact regarding the Hello, Dolly songs - years after the film's release, Andrew Stanton went to see the Broadway revival of the original stage show. Going backstage, he learned that Gavin Creel, who played Cornelius, had a dog named WALL-E, and that one of the dressers had named her daughter after EVE.

This billboard towered over Sunset Boulevard at some point in
2008.

32) The film obviously has an environmental message and a bit of mockery of big corporations with all the Buy 'n' Large stuff. But according to Andrew Stanton, "I wasn't trying to be anti anything. I think I was just trying to go 'Look, too much of a good thing of anything is a cautionary tale.' Honestly, everything I did was in reverse. It was like I've gotta go with trash because I love what it does to my main character and it's very clear, and then I went backwards from that. I said 'Why would there be so much trash?'. Well, it'd be really easy for me to show we'd bought too much stuff and it'd be really easy to show that without having to have it explained and it's kind of fun. It's fun to be satirical like that. You know we all have that sort of Simpsons bent, you know. So I just went with what felt somewhat true. I mean I think we've always felt that we have to be sort of disciplined in that area."

In that interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he added, "I hate being preached to and I assume other people do too in a movie. So I went there very reluctantly, and it ended up being out of pure necessity to my main drive, which was I just wanted to believe in the authenticity of why WALL-E was alone. It was really logic at the time, so we're talking 2005-06, that led me to any of the science and environmental and sociological choices that I did. I just went with kinda what was happening around me. We were having anywhere from two to a dozen boxes from Amazon show up at my doorstep every other day... I just started to think, like, 'Where does all this [CENSORED BECAUSE I WANNA KEEP THIS BLOG PG] go?'"

33) After the end credits, there are three logos. The first is, natch, the Walt Disney Pictures logo. The second is the PIXAR logo, which includes a gag where Luxo Jr.'s bulb goes out. So WALL-E enters the scene and replaces the bulb - look closely and you'll see that the bulb he replaces it with is a more eco-friendly one. And the third logo? It's the one for Buy 'n' Large!

Here's one more fun fact for you... I have a theory that you can put WALL-E in any picture (well, maybe not ANY picture, but you know what I mean) and it'll automatically become hilarious. Let's see if it does:

Well? Does it?

Sources:
- https://variety.com/2008/digital/news/how-to-build-a-better-robot-1117987668/
- https://www.moviefone.com/news/wall-e-pixar-movie-trivia/
- https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70024/10-space-age-facts-about-walle
- https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/45885-wall%C2%95e-writerdirector-andrew-stanton
- https://web.archive.org/web/20080626061223/http:/www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_14899.html
- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/wall-e-director-andrew-stanton-film-was-inspired-by-amazon-apple-1279519/
- https://ew.com/movies/2018/06/27/wall-e-anniversary-andrew-stanton-hello-dolly/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20110711103245/http://adisney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/wall-e/media/downloads/WALLEProductionNotes.pdf
- The film's DVD commentary

Well, there you go. Thirty-three (technically thirty-four, but thirty-three REAL ones) fun facts about WALL-E. Usually I only have thirty-one fun facts in these "Did You Know?"s, but I decided to do thirty-three this time. Maybe I'll do thirty-three in ALL of my "Did You Know?"s from now one. We'll just have to wait and see...