Inside an animated masterpiece

Wall-E might be the best film of this year.

It has everything going for it: emotional depth, a surprising thematic depth and beautifully rendered landscapes. It’s cute–surprising for a movie set on post-apocalyptic Earth–and is imbued with a sense of wonder and purpose. In short, Wall-E is a continuation of Pixar Animation’s incredible track record of filmmaking, from Toy Story to Ratatouille.

So you can understand why I was surprised by Angus Maclane, one of the directing animators on Wall-E, after I ask him why he likes animation.

“I don’t know,” Maclane says, pausing. “I don’t know if I like animation.”

Oh. That can’t be true, right? Maclane, a Portland native who now lives in San Francisco, has worked at Pixar since 1997, when he started as an intern. Since then he’s been hands-on with all of the studio’s films. On Wall-E he supervised 40 other artists, working for three-and-a-half years on a film that may very well end up nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

He laughs off his previous statement.

“I like stories, and I like films, and I like making movies. Animation is … there’s a lot of good animation and there’s a lot of bad animation,” Maclane says. “The chances of a live-action movie being better than an animated movie are higher, just percentage-wise, but animation has the ability to … there’s something about the stylization of the world that the audience watching the movie, up front, they’re wondering: What kind of movie is this? Who are these characters? And you can have characters who are super unrealistic, but still have believable qualities.”

Believability is not a problem with the world of Wall-E–if anything it’s too real, scary almost.

It paints a picture our future where humans have abandoned the Earth after generations of pollution and waste made unlivable, only to find themselves in an over-automated hell on giant spaceship somewhere in the far reaches of space.

WALL-E, the titular hero robot, seems to be the only soul left on the planet, toiling between sandstorms in an effort to clean up the trash left long ago by humans.

For a kid’s movie, this plot brings up some uncomfortable questions and truisms about human wastefulness. What do we need? What are our priorities? Do the things we consume have a negative effect on our lives? Many critics have pointed to this subtle message of personal and environmental ethics as sign that Wall-E is more worthy than other animated works. Maclane disagrees.

“There’s been a lot made of it,” he says. “I think, certainly, Wall-E is a story about a guy who collects a lot of stuff and ultimately his life is not fulfilled. And then when he finds EVE, he realizes that’s what life is about: It’s about love. So that’s really kind of the bigger story…. It was a love story first.”

Communicating that love story, between two robots who can’t really speak except in bleeps and blaps, created an interesting problem for the team behind Wall-E. The first 40 minutes of the film are dialogue free, a gutsy move for any movie, especially one aimed at kids. Was this film harder to make, I wondered, than other Pixar pictures?

“First of all, there was more of a pressure on story, to communicate all of the story ideas through storytelling itself,” Maclane says. “It wasn’t a harder film to animate necessarily, but it was a harder and more challenging film to do storyboards for…. Usually when you go to animation there is a jump in appeal and interest, but for [Wall-E] more so, there was a pretty big leap.”

Again, though, Pixar was successful, and Wall-E once again bridged the gap between children’s filmmaking and broad appeal, proving why they are the most important studio in animation. How do they do it? Well, they make movies for themselves, Maclane says.

“It’s hard to go: ‘I’m going to make a movie for this hypothetical person, because that’s what I think they’d like.’ I don’t know how you chase that. Especially when a movie takes four or five years to make, it’s like, that could change,” he says. “So for me, and I know for other filmmakers at [Pixar], it’s just the idea of making the movie you believe in … If you make enduring characters, with an interesting, relatable storyline that can have deeper emotions in it that adults will like, along with characters that the kids will like, then you end up reaching a wide audience.”

Wall-EOut now on DVD****1/2