Do Robots Have Elbows?

One of the big points of discussion in creating the character of WALL-E was whether or not he should have elbows.

"Early in the film, we had designed WALL-E with elbows," explains supervising animator Steve Hunter. "This gave him the ability to bend his arms. As animators, we were fighting for it thinking he's got to be able to touch his face, hang off a spaceship, and have a wide range of motion. But when you really looked at it, it didn't feel right. He's designed to do a task, which is to pull trash into his belly. Why would he have elbows? It didn't make any sense. So with Andrew's help and an inspired idea by directing animator Angus MacLane, we gave him a track around his side which allowed him to position his arms differently and give him a range of motion. It helped us flesh out the character a lot more. Something like elbows may seem kind of trivial but the way we solved the problem makes you believe in WALL-E more because we didn't take the easy way out."

Despite the relative simplicity of his movements, animating WALL-E proved to be one of the toughest assignments yet for the animation team. According to supervising animator Barillaro, "WALL-E has a lot of different controls including about 50 for the head alone. He's not organic like a human. We had to boil his movements down to their bare essence to make them effective. The first thing the animators wanted to do when they got a scene with him was to do all their tricks like bouncing his head around. They were trying to get too broad and too human. We had to keep reminding them to pare things down and go as simply as possible with the animation. Simpler is definitely better in this case."

With WALL-E's voice being such an important part of his personality, the animators worked in close concert with sound designer Ben Burtt to inspire one another. Typically, the animators would work with the rough designs to prepare test animation. Burtt would then add WALL-E's voice, and send it back to the animators for another pass. Voice and animation would get edited together, and out of that would come the final performance.

"She has this gracefulness and elegance in the way

she moves which you'd expect in a technically advanced robot."

~ Angus MacLane, Directing Animator

Animating EVE also posed its share of challenges for the group. With only two blinking eyes and four moving parts, she required a lot of advanced thought and just the right subtle movement. Designed to look like a futuristic robot, EVE is the epitome of elegance and simplicity.

"We wanted her to be graceful," says Stanton. "There are different ways to convey what is masculine and what is feminine in this world and we felt that she should be fluid, seamless, she should have attractive feminine qualities."

MacLane explains, "While WALL-E's movements are more traditional with motors, gears and cogs, EVE is this sleek egg-shaped robot who moves through the use of magnets. Every frame and composition has to be cheated ever so slightly so that it's pleasing to the eye. She has this gracefulness and elegance in the way she moves which you'd expect in a technically advanced robot."

Hunter adds, "Every plane change, every angle, and even the way her head curved around to the back when rotated had to be posed in a certain way to make it feel right. Everything with her had to be really, really subtle. Basically, she consists of only four parts, and two eyes that blink. We had a lot of discussions about how she would move using her arms. We treated her almost like a drawing in some ways and came up with just the right poses to express emotion. It's pretty amazing how much you really read into her."

In addition to some of the other main robot characters -- Auto, M-O, the reject bots, among others -- the character design team created a catalogue of robots and crowds of up to 10,000 humans to populate the Axiom. A modular robot system was devised using a series of different robot heads that could be combined with a variety of arms and bodies. Painted various colors and otherwise differentiated, countless robots were created.

Co-producer Collins notes, "We created a library of characters with interchangeable parts so that we could do a build-a-bot program. We could choose from different kinds of treads and arms. You could swap them to create different silhouettes and characters. We had close to a hundred variations and about 25 different basic silhouettes that we could mix and match to make the world seem fuller."

MacLane credits Stanton with inspiring the animators to do their best work. "What makes Andrew such a successful director," says MacLane, "is his ability to see the film in its entirety at all times. He's able to zero in on what you're working on and suggest how to make it better for the sequence. His sense of story is so strong and he knows how to communicate that to the animators. He likened good storytelling to telling a joke. He's ultimately trying to tell a really good joke over a period of nearly 90 minutes. We have all these building blocks that evoke emotions and he's trying to figure out the best way to tell it. Our job in animation is to make sure we're communicating clearly to the audience and that it supports his ideas for the story."

Stanton sums up his appreciation for the animators on the film. "They were just such champions of this movie, and they really loved the concept, and particularly the challenges and the limitations that we had put upon ourselves for designing all the characters the way we did. They got it from the very beginning."

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