Disney movies have always brought out something incredible in front of the screen. From kicking off its journey in the 1950s, the studio continued to release several extraordinary pieces that continued to take significant importance in the entertainment world.
Disney WALL-E’s Titular Character Was Inspired by a Trash Compactor
WALL-E director, Andrew Stanton told The Hollywood Reporter‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast about the strange inspiration that led to the creation of the titular star.
He got his inspiration at a baseball game with his editor on Finding Nemo. He shared,
“I borrowed his binoculars and then I missed an entire inning just looking at them and starting to make them look happy and mad and sad. … That cracked it open for me. That’s pretty much what I did: I put binoculars on top of a trash compactor.”
However, the character was not completed without his voice with the director having a special requirement for its voice.
“I kept saying for about two years to my producer: ‘I need it like R2-D2! I need it like R2-D2.’ Finally he said, ‘Why don’t we just get the guy who did R2-D2?’”
Eventually, voice actor, Ben Burtt, who has a huge role in the Star Wars franchise got on board for the titular character. Along with WALL-E, he also lent his voice to many other actors shown in the movie. Not just that, the movie also has a significant contribution from late business magnate, Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs Has a Significant Contribution to Disney’s WALL-E
Also Read: The Live-Action Disney Remakes Deserve More Love
Stanton further talked about the several movie themes that were incorporated into the movie stating in the same interview,
“I hate being preached to and I assume other people do to 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.”
He further explained,
“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.”
He continued,
“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 sh-t go?”
As for how Pixar’s major shareholder, Steve Jobs had a role in inspiring the movie, he shared,
“The iPhone came out in ’06, two years before the movie came out. … I was literally one of the first people to get the iPhone before it was brought out to the world officially because Steve [Jobs] was our boss. … I started playing with it and was kind of crazily going, ‘Why is this feeling familiar? This is basically the future and there should be nothing about this that’s familiar.’ It was the addictive quality of it.”
That thought eventually led to envisioning humans as amorphous blobs who lived in a pampered lifestyle leading them to become lazy. Thus, having Jobs’ as his superior led him to get struck by another inspiration.
Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that got abandoned and left covered in trash and pollution, WALL-E, a waste-collecting robot is left behind to clean up after humans evacuated the planet. Later in the movie, the curious robot ends up discovering a small plant and falls in love with another robot named EVE. The duo then kicks off their journey to reconnect humanity with their home planet. It was a critical and commercial success grossing $532.5 million as per The Numbers.
WALL-E is streaming on Disney+.
