Floating the Day Away...

WALL*E Downplays Message

Andrew Stanton, co-writer and director of Disney/Pixar's upcoming animated SF romance WALL*E, told reporters that he didn't set out to make a message movie about environmentalism or the consequences of consumerism.

"I'm not one of those people that comes up with a theme and then writes to it," Stanton said in a news conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., on June 20. "I like to go with sort of natural things that seem to be firing, and then somewhere sort of halfway I realize what the theme is."

The movie, set 800 years in the future, centers on WALL*E, a little trash-compacting robot, who is the last thing on an abandoned, garbage-covered Earth. Humanity fled the ravaged planet centuries earlier in a luxury cruise starship called the Axiom. When a sleek probe robot arrives on Earth to search for signs of life, WALL*E falls head over treads in love and finds himself caught up in an adventure that affects the fate of both robots and humans alike.

"I realized what I was pushing with these two programmed robots was their desire to try and figure out what the point of living was, and it took these really, like, irrational acts of love to sort of discover them against how they were built," Stanton (Finding Nemo) said. "And I said, 'That's it. That's my theme: ... Irrational love defeats life's programming."

The ecological message came as a way to tell that story, Stanton said. "I don't have an ecological message to push," he insisted, adding: "Everything I wanted to do was based on the love story. I wanted the last robot on Earth. ... I have to get everybody off the planet. I have to do it in a way that you get it without any dialogue. You have to be able to get it visually in less than a minute. So trash did that. You look at it, you get it."

And the lazy overfed humans on the Axiom? "Well, then I went backwards from that, and said, 'Well, why would there be too much trash? Well, it'd be really easy for me to get that we all bought too much stuff.' And it'd be really easy to show that without having to have to be explained, and it's kind of fun. It's fun to be satirical like that."

WALL*E--with an original story by Stanton and Pete Docter and a screenplay by Stanton and Jim Reardon--opens June 27. --Patrick Lee, News Editor

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the little lamp discovers there's more to life than just chasing balls!!