RT was among a group of journalists invited to the factory that Luxo built: Pixar Animation Studios. We were given the whirlwind tour as the company winds up for its big summer release Wall-E, set to pop on June 27, 2008, and also got to see the first 30 minutes of the film. Finally, we ended with an intimate Q+A session with the film's writer/director Andrew Stanton.

"Small on the massive backdrop..."
Andrew Stanton said that during our interview in reference to a story element in Wall-E but he could has just as easily been describing Pixar's clean, green, and charmed campus-like headquarters off a quiet backstreet in Emeryville, CA. Small is the building itself, in terms of production houses at least. Its physical footprint is tiny. The massive backdrop is of course Hollywood and the billions that have been transacted around the stories and art coming from said building, a whole world of profit and cheer and excellence emanating outward, movie magic in every sense.

Check out this "all Certified Fresh" Pixar roll-call and Tomatometer scores:

• Ratatouille - 95%
• Cars - 75%
• The Incredibles - 97%
• Finding Nemo - 98%
• Monsters, Inc. - 95%
• Toy Story 2 - 100%
• A Bug's Life - 91%
• Toy Story - 100%

Our tour began in the enormous and airy central lobby which connects two sides of the building and houses everything from a cereal room to employee mailboxes, bathrooms to comfy chairs to lounge on, and of course a delicious-smelling café. The idea is not unlike a quad on a university or a student center, a place where despite their ultimate destination, all must pass through and interact with one another. In this instance, the place was still packed with Ratatouille paraphernalia hanging from the posts and walls while tucked in the corner were past standees of other Pixar films. In fact, all through the halls of Pixar, one finds concept art, exhibits, and some amazingly realized figurines and maquettes.

Shall we play a game?
We then rolled up to a massive server room that reminded me of something out of Wargames. I expected to see WOPR standing there in a corner humming away. Racks and racks of servers relentlessly chewing away on data. Our tour guide told us that despite the advances in processing power, it still takes an incredible amount of time to render one second of film.

Deeper in the building we found the art department and animators. No cubicle farm here, the brass at Pixar decided to let individuality be the reigning factor in office design. From a tiki lounge to a storage shed complete with window-boxed flowers to one of apparently several functioning bars, the animators looked to be a happy bunch whose creativity spilled over into all that they did.

Finding Wall-E
After our tour, we were led into a plush screening room where Stanton briefly set up Wall-E for us, noting that we were among the first to see the first 30 minutes of the film. The lights went low, a comet flashed overhead in a star sky ceiling, and that familiar Pixar logo crawled across the screen.

The planet is awash in garbage. It is piled high, in fantastic towers, while dust-choked skies and unchecked winds ravage. Tales of a quick exit and desertion are everywhere: scattered newspapers and display monitors imploring people to leave, storefronts left open, and running through it all is a single robot tagged Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class). Wall-E is, like all machines, doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing and what he was programmed for: cleaning up. Throughout the course of the first few minutes though, we learn that he has also developed a personality.

He is self-repairing (stopping along the way to retread his "feet" from another, broken down Wall-E unit) and works to compact and pile the garbage. He collects trinkets as he is cleaning up garbage, shiny things, toys, which he stores in the maintenance shed in which he lives with a cockroach. In seems, despite being the last of his kind, that Wall-E has survived how most of us do: just getting through the day until he comes home to his sanctuary. It is here where we really get to meet Wall-E. While watching Hello Dolly, he gently clasps his hands together and stares at the screen, obviously alone.

The design of Wall-E is nothing short of spectacular. The movie instantly looks and feels exactly like what it is supposed to. Wall-E himself, has cute giant eyes, a short stumpy body, and whirrs and clicks that sound child-like and kind. He oozes personality and charm. It's almost too cliché to repeat it but we're doing it anyway: we forgot that we were watching animation.

A Robot's Life
Day in and day out Wall-E toils until a massive ship plops down and drops off EVE, a sleeker newer, fiercer unit who not only tries to blow Wall-E away but begins scanning the planet with an almost crazed sense of desperation. A monster dust storm rolls through and EVE and Wall-E take cover, getting to know each other through cautious interaction, like every first date ever. When EVE finally finds what she is looking for, she buttons into a pod-like device and awaits the return of the mothership. As the ship blasts off into space, Wall-E decides to jump aboard and off into space he goes, toward his rendez-vous with the former inhabitants of Earth.

I love every bit of this so far. The film hits on some of the best parts of sci-fi and has such rich characterization and subtlety throughout that you feel very well taken care of as an audience member. Watching this first chop of film, with little human dialogue (other than incidental) for the first 30 minutes, you feel like someone was paying attention to films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Castaway, the Qatsi trilogy, The Bear, Faces and more. The effect is something I never thought I would see in a film from Pixar and speaks to the film's bold ambition and dedication to a conceit.

After the film screened, we were joined by a thoughtful and clearly proud Andrew Stanton for an extended interview:

Was the intention to make Eve look like an Apple product?

Andrew Stanton: We were certainly influenced by the design. The biggest thing was, what's the sexiest other end of the spectrum. We kept saying Wall-E is a tractor and she's a Mercedes. So [in] the world of technology, what's the sleekest, most seamless, where the moving parts are hidden. So we sort of riffed off of anything of that ilk. Although after we had her designed, we had Johnny Iams, who does all of the design at Apple, we invited him over and he was very seduced by it. Who knows if a weird chicken and egg thing will happen (laughs) based on that. He approved highly.

What kind of reaction were you getting because in the first 30 minutes there was no dialogue in the film?

Andrew Stanton: First of all, I think that that's a misnomer. There is dialog all through it. All I am saying is that they are not necessarily saying words in a language that you know. What I wanted was integrity. It all comes down to just as much as I believe that Luxo is a lamp and that it has a life in it and it thinks like a lamp and acts like a lamp and I don't have to be told that, it doesn't have to be spelled out to me, I just get it right away, I wanted the same thing with the robots. I wanted you to believe that that's a machine and it's been there for hundreds of years, it's been weathered, and it has a thought process on its own. It was designed a certain way so therefore it would have a certain way that it spoke electronically and Eve was designed a certain way and would speak a certain way electronically. I just wanted things to be sort of, logic-based, and it was all to service the integrity of the world, because I just want to believe that I am there. I want to believe it's really happening. So that shows the look of the film, the lens choice, some of the technological advances we made so that you'll get more of a sense of the three dimensional atmosphere. Anything we did was just to enhance the experience of believability.