The WALL•E panel was under publicized and pretty much ignored, but this did not do the 4 clips we were shown justice! This movie looks truly amazing. It was, as Andrew Stanton said, “an animators dream” because there is no dialogue and it’s all done through motion and gesture. We saw 4 clips that had the audience on the edge of there seats.
Read on for the rest of the story…
The first being the one that I think just about everyone has at one point seen. We see WALL•E going through a typical day, starting with him charging up with his under-chin solar panels and then moving on to crush trash into cubes. This changes into time lapse and shows him working a full day staking tiny cubes of trash. He does take time to find fun things to play with, like a key fob that when he pushes the button you hear that cliché “bloop bloop” that you would expect to hear from a foreign sports car. This got a chuckle from the audience. Our buddy also played with a slinky, bra (this got the biggest laugh), fire extinguisher, rubber ducky, a shoe, and a slew of other things.
The second clip is when WALL•E shows EVE, a sleek AIBO like robot probe, around his crib. As Stanton puts it “WALL•E has fallen head over heels in love with EVE” so WALL•E is out to impress EVE. First thing EVE sees is a talking bass that she immediately turns her eyes red and points her gun/hand ready to blow it into another universe. WALL•E rapidly calms her down and moves on to show her some bubble wrap, EVE giggles, and then when WALL•E turns his back she rapidly pops every bubble on the bubble wrap pad. Next he shows “her” a light bulb that as soon as she grabs it lights up. Hmm, this has never happened before! As soon as WALL•E grabs it, it goes out.
Next WALL•E shows EVE a Rubix cube (or as I call it the vain of my childhood), of course EVE solves the cube right before WALL•E returns with his favorite item, a video cassette. EVE immediately begins to unravel the cassette. WALL•E jumps and manually re-winds it before sticking it into the VCR to see if it’s broken. luckily no, it’s not broken. Instead Hello Dolly pops up on the screen. Yes this was the REAL Hello Dolly, which looked interesting to say the least (you don’t expect live action in a Pixar movie). Now WALL•E tries to show EVE the Hello Dolly dance… she, of course, over does it and bounces his house violently. He then does a spin, and EVE spins like a helicopter and knocks him into a wall. This ends the second clip.
The next clip we saw was EVE getting back on her ship to leave, and WALL•E decides to leave his cockroach/buddy on the ground, which got a big AWWWWW from the crowd. WALL•E desperately clamps on to the side of his ship while it crashes through the trash filled atmosphere.
They run past the sun where his chest solar charger fills him up almost immediately. Then he goes past the rings of Jupiter and runs his hand through the belt littering star bits down. This gave the feel of “epic adventure” which seems to be a stigma in many Disney/Pixar movies. The clip quickly ends with the smaller ship entering a bigger ship
The Final clip we saw was WALL•E making things worse for EVE, so she has decided to send him back to earth. WALL•E wants none of this, and becomes very sad. She wants to put him in a pod that would rocket to earth. Soon after there argument begins a third robot comes in, so they quickly hide. This third robot puts a potted plant on the floor of the pod.
WALL•E decides he wants to give this to EVE, as soon as he does this the third robot hits the release button and the pod rockets off. WALL•E, trying to stop the ship, accidentally hits the absurdly big self-destruct button. EVE sees the ship blow up in the distance and quickly shoots off toward it, afraid her new found buddy/lover is dead (dead?… can robots die? Can they fear, love, or feel emotion?) luckily WALL•E and his ingenuity prevail, he rockets past her using a fire extinguisher as jet propulsion. They fly past each other a quickly turn around and try to meet in the middle again. The clip ends with them meeting.
“This” as the person sitting next to me said “Was the most amazing clip I’ve seen in a long, long time”. I think most people were totally amazed by what they saw.
At the Q and A we find out that no, there’s no intention of making this a 3D movie… YET but it’s fairly easy to do in post. We also found out the Toy Story 3 will indeed be in 3D… I can only assume the official title will be Toy Story 3D, so when that’s released we will all know I called it!
We also found out that there is no confirmed appearance of the pizza planet truck, but to “watch closely in the first 20 minutes of the movie” so my guess would be there’s a degrading pizza planet truck in a trash pile somewhere, but this is only a guess.
We also confirmed that John Ratzenberger will indeed be making an appearance as a character named John, for a change!
It was funny that Stanton downplayed the clips, ate his humble pie if you will, apologizing for the “dark, and sometimes overblown” clips… this was ridiculous, and in my opinion these were the best clips brought to WonderCon! Needless to say, I’ll be the creep in the back of the theater full of kids watching this movie on release date.
He did announce that Toy Story 3 will be the first Pixar 3-D movie!.
