I had to trick the guys here to get the project going. After we finished Finding Nemo and I came back from vacation - you're basically under-the-radar and no-one's paying attention to you here at that point - with three storyboard artists I secretly boarded the first act of WALL-E, because I felt that if I even tried to talk about it with people here, or how it should work, I wouldn't be able to do get it across. I felt I had to prove it to them and they'll either say, "Yes you can do it," or "No you can't," and we won't waste any time. And that's how this movie got the green light.

For WALL-E we faced a number of distinct challenges separate from other projects here. One of the biggest ones was the fact that most of the movie had no dialogue. As storyboarding artists a lot of the burden fell on us to try and convey a lot of character and emotion and nuts-and-bolts storytelling without the benefit of lots of dialogue.

We looked a lot at Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin - old silent film. It was treated more like we were making a semi-silent film for much of the movie. We all watched The General one day at lunch, they screened it for us. It's really amazingly affective - piece by piece it works, but when you see it all together you really feel those references.

We also looked at lots of movies that did that so well - 2001, The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf - and those are movies where a large portion of them are dialogue-free or not dialogue-dependent. But we found that most great movies have elements like that so it's not that foreign a moviemaking technique, it's just one of those things that if you talk about it, people can convince themselves that it won't work, or they won't go and see something like that.

Talking is so prevalent in all animated movies, as it is in ours as well, and it was a big challenge to complete abandon that device. WALL-E has to be so charming that you fall in love with him without dialogue.