Robot in Love

robot in love

Last year’s offering, “Ratatouille,” about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with “Wall-E,” a $180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin.

Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn’t care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not when the movie comes out on Friday. “I never think about the audience,” he said. “If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.”

Mr. Stanton, 42, sat in a Toronto hotel room this month, shaggy-haired and bearded, bouncing in his chair with a tween’s frenzied energy. In this way he seemed to embody the anti-corporate posture that is part of the Pixar mythology. When John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative executive, announced the company’s $7.4 billion acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he did so in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Employees at the Pixar “campus” in Emeryville, Calif., ride scooters and play foosball. “It’s like a film school with no teachers,” Mr. Stanton said. “Everyone actually wants you to take risks.”

Such is the Pixar brand, or anti-brand: a multibillion dollar company that acts like a nerd hobbyist in a basement. But that balancing act is even tougher to pull off as a subsidiary of Disney, a company whose very name has been turned into a neologism — Disneyfication — for a kind of bland commercial aesthetic.

Perhaps to assure the public that nothing has changed under new ownership, an early trailer for “Wall-E” plays up Pixar’s carefree mystique. The teaser, narrated by Mr. Stanton, describes a 1994 lunch, when the central Pixar players were finishing “Toy Story,” the first feature-length CG animated film. Over lunch they sketched on napkins characters that would end up in “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.”

On one napkin a lonely robot emerged. “We said: �What if humanity left and some little robot got left on and kept doing the same thing forever?’ ” said Mr. Stanton, who joined Pixar in 1990 as its second animator and ninth employee. “That was the saddest character I’d ever heard of.”

“Wall-E” took a back seat to another project, a film Mr. Stanton wrote and directed about a fish father looking for his son: “Finding Nemo” (2003). It went on to earn $340 million domestically and $865 million worldwide. The day after the 2004 Academy Awards, in which Mr. Stanton won the Oscar for best animated feature, he went to work on “Wall-E,” forgoing a planned six-month vacation.

“We were always frustrated that people saw CG as a genre as opposed to just a medium that could tell any kind of story,” he said. “We felt like we widened the palette with �Toy Story,’ but then people unconsciously put CG back in a different box: �Well, it’s got to be irreverent, it’s got to have A-list actors, it’s got to have talking animals.’ ”

So Mr. Stanton took “Wall-E” to a more somber, less sassy place (though there is some sass of course). The film is set in 2700 on