When Pixar first started working on "Wall-E" several years ago, the studio considered making the animated movie -- about a lovable robot on a future Earth -- without any dialogue at all. As the film's screenplay evolved, a few talking humans dropped in, but "Wall-E" is still distinguished by what isn't said, particularly in the movie's opening act.
Although the film's countless actions speak much louder than its few words, "Wall-E" is based on a fully formed script, nominated for the original screenplay Oscar.
"That was huge," the film's director, Andrew Stanton, who shares his screenwriting nomination with Jim Reardon and Pete Docter, says of the Academy Award recognition. "Because there's still this lingering, knee-jerk response that animation is a subgenre or that it's easier than live action."
It is nevertheless Pixar's fifth time in the original screenplay category, with earlier nominations for "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille."
As a page of "Wall-E's" nominated screenplay dramatizes, an animated script can be a complex document, particularly when you don't have nouns and verbs to help explain a character's feelings. The beeps in "Wall-E," particularly, are not random sounds -- in fact, a look at the script shows that each beep can be translated into a specific line of dialogue. "Every sound he makes carries some meaning," says Ben Burtt, who provided Wall-E's voice design and was the film's supervising sound editor.
Few of "Wall-E's" scenes are as critical as what unfolds on page 16, the first time that the film's lead characters share a romantic moment.
A sandstorm has driven Wall-E, a garbage-compacting robot, back into his truck, where he has brought the plant-searching Eve, whom he has just met, for safety. Wall-E shows her around his lair, which is crammed with pop-culture artifacts (a Rubik's Cube, for example) that not only summon up Earth's distant past but also illustrate Wall-E's playful personality, as well as Eve's advanced intellect (she solves it in seconds).
"To me, this scene was trying to capture what a first date is all about," says Stanton, who imagines that Wall-E is the automaton equivalent of a 13-year-old boy, while Eve is the alluring college freshman. "They are meeting each other and becoming aware of the more subtle aspects of the other person. The whole gestalt of her is foreign to him -- how mysterious women are to men. They always seem more refined, they always seem more intelligent, they always seem more into it."
