He is adorable. I don’t really care what he might resemble- the whole movie seems pretty original to me (pixar hasn’t let me down so far!). i tried to find out more information about the other characters and from this youtube video it seems like there are ton of robots in the movie.
???
Are people being intentionally stubborn about this because The Great Lord Almighty PIXAR can do no wrong and have no limits on their creativity?
They look totally alike.
WALL-E doesn’t hover. He doesn’t walk. He doesn’t roll on a ball. He doesn’t fly with a propeller. He has triangular tank treads, exactly like Johnny-5. They make up half his body and they’re identical to J5.
For eye & face. . .he doesn’t have a blank mask. he doesn’t have a luminescent “eye strip”. He doesn’t have glowing orbs, or non-glowing orbs. He has a segmented binocular where the eyes move independently. This is his most expressive feature, and it’s just like J5.
When I first saw the commercials, I just figured it was a complete tribute and/or rip-off.
On a “robot similarity scale” where R2D2 and C3PO are a 1, and the Stormtroopers are 100. . .WALL-E and J5 are about a 90.
(yes, I know stormtroopers aren’t robots)
It is either pure coincidence, or osmosis. Direct Andrew Stanton claims to have not been influenced at all by the Short Circuit films.
What about that Robots movie? Same exact thing. Doesn’t sound too original to me.
I, too, figured that Wall-E had to be designed with the robot from Short Circuit in at least the back of their minds. There haven’t been too many robots with the stereo eyes and the triangular treads (plus two arms). If they’re saying that they weren’t influenced at all, I think they’re just covering their asses. Things like the Harlamn Ellison/Terminator and the Kit Reid/Honey I blew up the Kid cases are still in people’s minds.
I can see why both films chose that design – that binocular vision thing gives an irresistable sense of personality to the character. Big expressive eyes make a character babylike and sympathetic – look at ET. Or all those Keane paintings. (while absence of eyes is spooky and threatening – Alien, or the eyeless bulldogs in “The Weirdstone of Brisingamen”, or some of the things in the Hellraiser movies). Furthermore, Wall-E’s eyes have that downward sad slant. He reminds me of those stupid robots in The Black Hole (V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and the other one), with their out-of-place “Goofy” eyes. In Wall-E, though, they seem to work.
You CAN build a sympathetic robot without obvious eyes – Robby or R2D2 – but in those ases there’s still something you can sort-of see as an eye (poster art turned Robby’s rotating gyros – or whatever they were – into eyes. R2D2’s got that single camera lens.)
The Short Circuit folks should THANK WALL*E. This is the most press that Short Circuit has received in about 15 years.
Watch this scene and tell me if you think Wall-E and Johnny 5 are the same. That’s some freaking amazing animation right there, especially the bit with the hands and when Wall-E sits down in the capsule.
Nobody said thay’re the same. And there’s nopt much point in comparing a rod-and-stick mechanical puppet from the 1980s to state-of-the-art computer animation in 2008. But it’s hard to deny the designs of the two are pretty similar.
I’m willing to accept that they weren’t thinking of Short Circuit at all when creating Wall-E, although I find it hard to swallow. The people working on this would be of an age to have seen the movie back in the 80s, and it’s the sort of movie that would appeal to someone interested in Wall-E too.
Still, the individual elements are sensible enough that they could have been developed independently. Wall-E is meant to be portrayed as a rusty outdated model, so ground conveyance instead of antigrav or whatever the white robot uses is a good way to express that. Treads are more sensible for a freely mobile unit; wheels are only sensible when you expect the unit to only travel on roads, and legs have been known to be a difficult method of transportation for a while. The eyes are simple enough, too; they wanted an expressive but still mechanical face.
Anyway, the plots are pretty clearly wildly dissimilar, so it’s not much of an issue to me if Wall-E is an homage to Johnny 5 or not.
I agree with all of this. Particular the face: speaking in terms of in-movie considerations, if you’re building a utility robot, the only features you need to give it are eyes: it doesn’t need a mouth or a nose. So a pair of binoculars on a stick are a logical design. From a creative point of view, if you’re making a movie about a robot, to make it empathetic all you really need are a pair of expressive eyes. I’ve absolutely no doubt that the guys at Pixar were aware of Short Circuit, and I’m sure they looked at their design at some point and thought, “Boy, that really looks like Johnny 5,” but I don’t think they deliberatly set out to mimic the design. I think they ended up with a similar look because they went through a similar set of decisions during the design process.
I haven’t seen Robots, but judging from the plot synopsis on IMDB, they’re not remotely the same.
Not at all. Robots was a clockworkpunk version of Cars: “See this city? It’s made by robots! Isn’t that awesome?” Wall-E appears to be plot-driven rather than setting-driven.
How is if for younger kids, my 4yo son loved cars (well he was 3 at the time) and Nemo, but really could not get into Ratatouille (me I loved the animation).
I am sure just the fact there are robots will go a long way, for a 4 y.o. there is nothing better than robots (well apart from pirate robots, which are the best thing ever, (excepting of course pirate ninja robots)))
This should be a good movie for little kids. The first half has almost no dialogue at all, and is entirely visual. Most of the comedy is slapstick: Wall-E’s a clumsy robot, and they use that to good humorous effect. The plot moves along at a brisk pace, so most kids won’t get bored. I’m not a good judge of what little kids will find scary, but I think there’s not much here even a really young kid would find frightening, even by G-rated standards. The two parts that might cause some problems are:
(Minor spoiler for one of the action set pieces:)
Wall-E and Eve are trapped in the garbage dump on the spaceship, and are menaced by giant trash-compacting robots (basically, large versions of Wall-E). However, the giant robots are only dangerous because they don’t realize there’s anyone else in the garbage dump with them, and when realize Wall-E and Eve are in danger, they act to save them.
…and…
(Major but predictable spoiler for the end of the movie:)
Wall-E gets badly hurt in the above scene, and then later appears to be killed. Of course, he turns out to be okay in the end. Pretty much every kid’s movie ever made has a scene like this, but the build up to it involved Wall-E taking a lot of abuse. The edge might be taken off by the fact that Wall-E’s a robot, and there are a couple of earlier scenes of him repairing himself, which might clue the kid into him turning out okay.
I wouldn’t hesitate to take my kids to it, if I had kids.
I think the thing that draws me the most about this movie is that Wall-E doesn’t seem to talk much at all. The expressive noises he makes are adorable and while it’s too much to assume that all the robots in the movie won’t talk, I’m hoping most of them follow suit.
They have some similarities, sure, but not nearly enough to make me think that it’s anything more than coincidence.
First, you have to consider that if you want to design a robot so that a human audience will find it relatable, then giving it two arms, two “feet” and two eyes is a fairly obvious start. J5 is hardly the only other robot in fiction with bilateral symmetry.
Making the eyes oversized is an extremely common practice in cartoons to make a character look “cute”. See Bambi, or practically any anime designed to appeal to young girls.
The wide, short face with no nose or mouth is similar, but Wall-e’s head bears far more resemblance to a pair of binoculars than it does to J5’s head. And given that the director claimed Wall-e was inspired by a pair of binoculars (as stated upthread) I see no reason to question this.
So, really that leaves “triangular tank treads” as the only remaining unexplained similarity. And that could easily be coincidence.
I think I read that there is very little dialogue in the film. I do like the noises Wall-E makes in the ads, though, especially the way he says his own name.
Eve was designed primarily by Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iPod and other Apple products. (Steve Jobs, of course, is the CEO of both Pixar and Apple.)
The Little Golden Book of Wall-E, like most of Pixar’s Little Golden Books, is a design gem. The drawings are hand-painted to look like a vintage Little Golden Book, and the text sometimes becomes big or small to fit the tone of the sentence. There’s even a cameo by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit as one of the pieces of Earth junk Wall-E picks up.
Thanks for the link. I wish website designers knew to put black around the video box so I don’t have to re-shape my window to get rid of that field of white which makes the dark shots impossible to see.
I’m so nervous about this movie. I don’t want to go see it. Inmost Disney/ Pixar movies, something extremely sad usually happens on the way to extreme happiness (remember Jessie’s song in Toy Story 2? I cried my eyes out, at twenty-four). That’s cool, you don’t mind it happening in lesser movies to lesser characters (like, I could give a shit about any of the characters in Ice Age2), but in this… to Wall-E… Lets just say, I’m a grown man, but if anything sad happens to Wall-E, I’m gonna BAWL MY FUCKIN EYES OUT.
Just say it now, if you’ve seen the movie… is there anything particularly sad? Don’t post spoilers, just say “yes” or “no”…
Will it be as sad as when B.O.B died in the Black Hole?
Scared me for life when I saw that, and I still can´t look at an egg whisk without choking up.
Me I just like the PIXAR movies for, errm, the kids, yeah that´s it.
The clip they released, in the capsule, had me giggling and clapping my hands the first time I saw it! It was just so awesome!
Spoiler about the clip linked above, spoiled for those of you who don’t want to watch it!
I nearly cried when Eve (though I didn’t know the name then) goes “No…no…” and then a half second later… “wall-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”!!! I was so excited and laughing like crazy!
I can’t wait to see this movie!