Why It's So Special: Against stiff competition, Wall-E is Pixar's most unusual hero - not least because he's a robot who communicates with a severely limited vocabulary.
Striving for realism, director Andrew Stanton avoided conventional voice casting and went to Burtt, the sound effects genius who pioneered the beeps and whistles of R2-D2.
Like his earlier creation, Burtt's genius here is to give Wall-E a distinctive character and humanity...despite his robotic origins. Ironically, Burtt ended up used his own voice as Wall-E's foundation, but fiddled with it to the point where it sounds mechanical.
Burtt speaks: "What [Stanton] wanted was the illusion that these robot characters, the speech and sounds they made were really coming from their functions as machines...
The problem does go back, for me, to the sort of primal R2-D2 idea, which is how do you have a character not speak words or, in the case of Wall-E, just a very few words, but you understand what is going on in their head and they also seem to have a depth of character."
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Comments
Hadouken76
Jun 28th 2010, 15:10
John Ratzengberg as the Inbominable snowman makes me laugh everytime...yellow ice anyone?
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s1monb
Jul 3rd 2010, 13:31
One of the many things I love about Pixar is their avoidance of stunt casting, in order to get the best person for the role. Albert Brooks; Ellen DeGeneres; Ed Asner; Craig T Nelson; Patton Oswalt; Dave Foley; None of these would be the obvious Hollywood choices for the lead role in your big summer movie. But they are all perfect...
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Hadouken76
Oct 6th 2011, 13:19
wow this is an old feature, for a second I thought someone had cloned my ID !
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nkutzler
Oct 6th 2011, 16:17
Don Rickels: of course, everything about Toy Story is amazing because of the genius timing, but still to this day, I call almost everyone an "uncultured swine". Of course, not about Picasso, but actually about movies since I became a movie buff. BTW, if you don't still absolutely love Toy Story even after you've turned 18, you're uncultured swine.
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nkutzler
Oct 6th 2011, 16:18
Sorry, Don Rickles. Didn't mean to make that mistake.
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bundyse
Oct 6th 2011, 21:51
Steve Jobs RIP
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