Comic-Con: Pixar's Robot Movie Wall-E and Selick and Gaiman's Coraline
View Photo GalleryFirst, there's Pixar's next toon, "Wall-E," from "Finding Nemo" director Andrew Stanton. "What if mankind had to evacuate earth and someone forgot to turn the last robot off?" he asked the crowd. "Overpopulation and runaway consumerism literally buried the world in trash." Stranded on a landfill planet, Wall-E is a rusty, 700-year-old trash-compacting robot who excavates the waste for clues about the humans that once lived there. His only companion is a cockroach (good thing Pixar made their last movie about rats — it should help prepare auds for more animated vermin), but it's not long before he's whisked aboard a starship, where he falls in love with a probe droid named Eve who doesn't return his affections.
Stanton shared a significant chunk of footage from the first act of the film and brought out Ben Burtt, the sound designer who brought R2-D2 to life through beeps and whirs. "One of the things I knew from the beginning is that I was not going to have dialogue in the traditional sense," Stanton said. Burtt developed a grammar of sound effects for each character, which the team is recording first (as they do with dialogue) so the artists have a performance from which to animate. "I was basically making 'R2-D2: The Movie,'" Burtt joked.
The big reveal here was the robot designs. For those who remember "Short Circuit," Wall-E looks like a miniature Johnny 5, with tank-like treads and a binocular-shaped face. His movements evoke the lamp brought to life in one of John Lasseter's first shorts, "Luxo Jr." Meanwhile, Eve and her ultra-modern companions look like the natural evolution of the Apple product line (fitting considering Steve Jobs' involvement in both companies) in a future where humans have devolved into "couch-potato blobs." (When asked, Stanton confirmed, "There is a live action element involved," but wouldn't say what that means.)
Later Saturday afternoon, I joined a super-select group of people to get the first glimpse anyone outside the production has seen of "Coraline," based on the popular Neil Gaiman novella. Both Gaiman and director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas") were on hand to introduce the footage, which improves upon Selick's earlier stop-motion animation work by making the entire movie in 3-D ("Nightmare" was retrofitted for the format to great success, but Selick is shooting "Coraline" in two-camera stereoscopy to give auds the real deal).
Before showing the footage, Selick walked the crowd through early animation tests. It's astonishing to see the body language these puppets are able to convey. The Coraline cast comes to life in a way neither Tim Burton's nor Aardman's characters ever have (which isn't so much a slight against those creators' wonderful work as a testament to Selick's attention to character). The clip itself — which features Coraline's first foray into the "Other" world, where the 3-D becomes more pronounced — conveys a look that is genuinely unique to the film, not an extension of the Tim Burton aesthetic we've seen in Selick's other projects (such as "James and the Giant Peach").
"I wanted the look of the film to be its own thing, not like other films I’ve worked on,” Selick explained. To that end, he hired Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi to design the characters (the top-heavy Miss Forcible is especially entertaining, and advances in silicone technology make it possible to reproduce Miss Spink’s jowly look in all its roly-poly glory). It’s a smart partnership. As John Lasseter can attest, the best toons benefit by injections of Japanese talent (Pixar often looks to Hayao Miyazaki for inspiration). Tadahiro’s work is heavily influenced by American drawings of the 1950s, filtered back through Eastern eyes, then translated into three dimensions by Selick and his team at Laika Entertainment (remember that name, which is likely to become the toon space’s next name brand).
2008 is shaping up to be a very good year for animation.
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