Pixar's shiny metal soul

When you clear security and step on to the Pixar campus, three-quarters of an hour out of San Francisco, the wattage of the sunshine seems to go up. There is an overwhelming and delicious smell of freshly mown grass. Among trim shrubs is a wide black tarmac path unblemished by chewing gum and, along it, bronzed paragons of healthy Californian youth, wearing T-shirts and cargo pants, fly past on little silver scooters.

Purpose-built at the behest of Pixar's former chairman Steve Jobs, the main offices of the world's foremost animation company are housed in a two-storey, red-brick warehouse-style building, set around an enormous atrium. Light streams in through glass louvres in the roof and the plate-glass front wall, and spills across a vast blond-wood floor.

On one side is a hip cafe-style canteen. On the other is an employee break room and play area. On one wall, a bank of games consoles is running demos of Pixar games for passers-by to play with. Nearby are a pool table, air-hockey, table football and, folded against a wall, a ping-pong table.

And in the middle, sitting on a wooden bench looking comfortable in a shaft of sunlight, are the two most important people in the building: WALL-E and Eve. I say “people"'; they're robots. But it is on the personal charms of these two the stars of Pixar's ninth animated feature that everything depends.

The company is, on the face of it, a quintessential flowering of that particular West Coast new-media business culture that replaced sharp suits. Even the corporation guy, WALL-E's grey-haired, suit-wearing producer Jim Morris, peppers round-table press interviews with “cool", “sucks", “neat", “I will tellya" and “It's kind of, like, oh my gosh."

Shiny happy people

Being given a tour by Randy Nelson the dean of Pixar university feels like being inducted into a cult. His smile is unwavering, and he utters gloopy catchphrases in a swooping, sing-song voice: “Thank you for helping us to tell our stories;" “Membership is one of the first things you have to feel;" “One of the jobs we have as managers is to make sure that people go home at the end of the day."

He explains that the purpose of the building's design which forces employees to visit the communal area every time they want to get something to eat, take a break or even go to the loo — is to make sure that everyone bumps into everyone else as often as possible. The reason? “We're doing art as a team sport."

The roll-call of Pixar's successes in the 13 years that it has been making animated features has been extraordinary: Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille ... And the roll-call of its flops? None. Not one.

As a journalist, therefore, you want to dislike Pixar; or at least find its dark side. Where's the story in “happy people make brilliant films, get well paid for it, love their work"? But all the evidence points to that being the case. I watched the first half-hour of WALL-E in Pixar's screening room with film hacks. And I swear that, when the section we were allowed to see came to an end, there was a sigh of disappointment.

Space robot

WALL-E tells the story of the last creature left on earth: an indefatigable solar-powered rubbish-compactor. Humans, having made a complete mess of Earth, have taken off into space and left this “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class" to clear it up. The opening shot pans down through WALL-E's world: valleys of rust and dust, scoured by a gritty wind and surmounted by mile-high ziggurats made of cubes of rubbish.

After 700 years of solitude, trundling about crushing rubbish into cubes and piling them on top of each-other, WALL-E has become a little eccentric. He has a pet cockroach and collects oddments with which he festoons the battered old trailer he calls home: Rubik's cubes, cutlery, fairy lights and such like. Not long into the film, Eve shows up a sleek and fast-moving space probe who floats like a bee, stings like a surface-to-air missile and looks like an iPod with arms. It is love at first sight for our clunky hero and it takes him, y'know, to infinity and beyond.

But the jokes are just so good, and so frequent, and the animation so exact and expressive, that as a viewer you are disarmed. WALL-E, for example, powers up with the distinctive old-school “Klongg!" of an Apple Mac, and there's a lovely bit of visual business when he chances on a “spork" and attempts to puzzle out where in his cutlery collection it belongs.

Dissing disney

Walt Disney studios gave us the first golden age of animation; a huge leap of creativity in a short space of time: between Steamboat Willie and Snow White, there was just a decade. Pixar's ascendancy over the past decade has been animation's second golden age.

Pixar's anxiety-of-influence relationship with Disney is, therefore, a large part of the story. Pixar's founder, John Lasseter, served a five-year apprenticeship as a Disney animator in the early 1980s, and as a youth even operated a ride at Disneyland. But that relationship has been a long love-hate wrangle played out in media headlines.

Pixar started life under Lasseter as the computer-animation division of Lucasfilm. In 1986, the Apple computers tycoon Steve Jobs bought it and Disney financed its first full-length feature, Toy Story. Its success made Lasseter's name and a fortune for Disney but it also marked a new era in animation, and one in which Disney would be eclipsed.

The subsequent Pixar films now financed half and half by Pixar and Disney repeated Toy Story's success; while Disney's own, hand-painted 2-D animations had a rockier ride. The two companies' relationship was a mixture of rivalry and mutual dependence; and Jobs and Disney's Michael Eisner began to feud over Disney retaining the sequel rights to Pixar movies.

Eisner sniped that The Incredibles had been “pretty pathetic". Jobs snapped back that obviously Pixar's films “don't stack up to Atlantis, The Emperor's New Groove or Treasure Planet" three spectacular Disney flops.

With Eisner gone, though, the deal has been renewed and things have settled down.

Lasseter's protege Andrew Stanton, who is also the writer-director of WALL-E, has wind-burned cheeks, a sandy beard and a loud quick-fire laugh. He's in his early forties, but looks closer to his mid-thirties. As a young animator, he applied to Disney for a job. “Three times and they turned me down. I was just a pimple-faced kid I'm sure if I were to see my portfolio work I wouldn't hire me, too. But it certainly made me bitter." He throws back his head and lets out a quick laugh.
sketches

In 2003, Finding Nemo, which he wrote and directed, won Pixar its first Best Animated Feature Oscar. Disney's The Lion King had at that point held the record for highest-grossing animated feature for 10 years. Nemo knocked it into second place.

As you walk around the Pixar studio, sketches from storyboards, clay sculptures, paintings and character studies from the films are displayed on the walls in little shrines. Here there's a wonderfully expressive charcoal rough by Stanton himself, capturing the look of Nemo's cynical seagulls; there, there's a panel of watercolours showing the front of a Paris restaurant in changing lights as a summer day progresses.

Here there's a full-length oil of Anton Ego, the gothically lugubrious restaurant critic from Ratatouille. Opposite are character drawings of his obese chef nemesis Gusteau, designed to show how the vast fat of his neck bulges as his head moves: side-sketches show a bowling ball sitting on a bag of jelly, an anvil on a cushion and a lead weight on a fat sirloin steak.

One huge painting hanging in the canteen of ants trotting over a “leaf bridge" was used as the “canonical" reference image for the whole visual feel of A Bug's Life. Similarly fastidious background thinking has gone into WALL-E.

Precision

From the foundation of Pixar onward, the film-makers have stressed that CGI is simply a new way of performing old tricks: storytelling is the core of what they do. One of the slogans that gets thrown around is: “We're not interested in making things that are realistic; we're interested in making things that are believable."

WALL-E is probably as far as Pixar has pushed this point. For all its technical wizardry, it demands, for its success, the exact timing and the physical accuracy that those silent films demanded. WALL-E's storyboard involved 125,000 drawings; redone, redrafted, reboarded and in most cases rejected. What began as Trash Planet a back-of-a-napkin idea from the now-legendary 1994 lunch of Pixar bigwigs where A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo are also said to have been cooked upm has been through 15 years and countless versions (action adventure, love story, “robot Spartacus") to reach this point.

“For every one thing that makes it to the screen," says Stanton, “there are 20 ideas that fell and for every plot idea there are five that we tried it another way. So all the rewriting frustrations the second, third, fourth drafts which we all recognise that a writer does in private we do: it's just in a very public forum."

Each film takes four years to make. The film's long opening shot required the construction of a detailed virtual set 5km squared.

Research Pixar and you will read until you're sick of it that the famous number-crunching “RenderMan" technique computer-animated 2.8 million individual hairs on a single furry monster in Monsters, Inc, and that “it takes eight hours to create one frame". I did some rudimentary maths on this last, much-repeated fact and concluded that if it were true, a feature-length animation would take about 118 years to produce.

What would it mean for a Pixar movie to tank? “Of course, it would suck!" Stanton exclaims with another burst of laughter. “I don't see any up-side to it."

Then he pauses. “Everything is an exercise in: how can we make ourselves as stupid and as ignorant as we were when we made Toy Story for the next film? So that we're just making it for the purest and most innocent of reasons that we're just making it as film fans who want to see a certain kind of movie or a certain movie that in our minds we haven't seen yet as a film-goer. The equation is as simple as that.
“It's very difficult to achieve that state of mind. I always equate it to sports. People say, ‘Oh, you must love your job, it must be the easiest thing in the world.' Well, it is: I get to play baseball every day. But I only get to play baseball for as long as I keep hitting home runs.

“And the irony is that I only get to hit a home run if I forget everything that's going on and just play it for the love of the game."

Fixed dimensions

The greatest formal challenge for the animators was Stanton's insistence that WALL-E and Eve were of fixed dimensions. In most animated films characters have huge plasticity. In Cars, for example, these supposedly mechanical objects shrug their shoulders, wiggle their eyebrows, peer round corners and behave in all respects like cartoons.

In WALL-E, there's no plasticity at all: as directing animator Angus MacLane puts it, “no squash and stretch".

WALL-E and Eve's emotions are conveyed, therefore in a film with more or less no English speech entirely through sound-effects and body language. And that is why, oddly enough, this state-of-the-art computer-generated outer-space robot romcom has as its most important ancestors the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

Beeps and whistles

WALL-E. director Andrew Stanton has said that he sees WALL-E as R2-D2: The Animation.

And, as animator Angus MacLane points out, R2-D2's “personality" was plain to viewers of Star Wars: yet the robot's vocabulary of expression was “body tilt, head rotate, light change colour?... that's it". But then, of course, the robot also beeped and whistled. And that is where WALL-E's sound designer Ben Burtt comes in. He is the man who invented R2's beeps and whistles the veteran George Lucas associate who designed the sound on all six Star Wars movies, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Howard the Duck (well, no one's perfect).

“Immediately, I thought this was going to be a fascinating idea," he says, “because what I love to do is create a world of sound. And the more of the world you can create, the more challenging and exciting I find it to be. I didn't have much experience. Everything I had done had been live action, and I was used to the live-action feature style ... but, of course, animated films are now treated like features. You expect to have a real world.

“It's not the world of the Walt Disney cartoon of the 1940s where it's all music and musical sound-effects for doing things drums and cymbal crashes and slide-whistles. That was a style unto itself, that took a lot of skill but that isn't how we're doing animation any more. We're taking the same approach you'd take to a live-action science-fiction movie."
Burtt produced a library of 2,600 sounds of which WALL-E alone had 300-400 available. Burtt had a policeman at his house, firing a Taser so he could record the zapping sound, when he noticed the officer had handcuffs with him. “So I recorded them opening and closing, and that became the cockroach ..."

Eve's awe-inspiring laser-blaster is the sound of a long spring, attached to a 12ft ladder, being dinked with a bit of wood. And the hurricane in the early part of the film is an old canvas punchbag that Burtt was dragging from one studio to another when he noticed that it made a sound like the wind.