ROBOT ROMANCE LOVE HAS NO LIMITS IN PIXAR'S ANIMATED 'WALL E.

Byline: Glenn Whipp

Film Writer

Ask a film lover to name the greatest living American director and you'd get a dozen or more answers, ranging from old-school favorites like Spielberg and Scorsese to art-house auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson and David Lynch. The Coens would surely show up. So would Woody Allen, provided you hadn't gone to the movies in the last 20 years.

But you could make a strong case for two names that probably wouldn't show up on anyone's list -- Pixar's Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird.

Bird you know from last year's Academy Award-winning "Ratatouille" and previous features like "The Incredibles" and "The Iron Giant."

Stanton flies even further under the radar, even though he had a hand in writing both "Toy Story" movies, as well as "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc."

Stanton made his directorial debut five years ago with "Finding Nemo," a gorgeous father-and-son fish tale that he co-wrote. It won the Oscar for animated film.

Now, Stanton is back and raising the bar again with "Wall E," a soulful, unabashedly romantic love story starring ... robots. With an opening half hour that features no words, only sound designer Ben Burtt's beeps and whistles, Stanton and Pixar again push the envelope of what an animated movie can be, delivering a masterpiece of monumental power and spectacular beauty.

A few words with our favorite filmmaker:

Much is made of this legendary lunch in 1994 where you and other Pixar giants sketched out the ideas for "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2," "Finding Nemo" and, apparently, "Wall E" -- all before the check arrived.

I know. It sounds like this perfect little moment where gold poured out of our mouths. And it's not.

You've had other lunches since then ...

Hundreds. And nothing came out of them. But it's true, at that particular lunch, we were throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. And there was one in the ocean. One was about your fears. And the other, which was more formed than the others, was about the last robot on Earth.

Did you ever think it would be made?

You have to remember the times. In the late '80s, when you said "animation," people inside and outside the industry thought it had to be a fairy tale and it had to be a musical. To put something in a box like that was really frustrating. We were trying to prove you could break conventions and do a different kind of movie.

Which you're still doing 20 years later.

We're very proud that we opened the door a bit with "Toy Story."

But there's such conditioning, particularly in this country, about what you're supposed to get with an animated movie. It feels like we're still being boxed in. It's just a larger box.

The ads play up Wall E's cuteness. But the opening, wordless portion of the movie conveys a deep, melancholy sense of loneliness.

I think everybody has hit a point in their lives where they think, "There's got to be more to life than this." Loneliness is an incredibly powerful emotional pool to play in. It was fun to start there.

Your view of the future could be described as pessimistic. Humans have abandoned the Earth because there's too much garbage. And, in the process, people have "evolved" to the point where their sedentary, disconnected lifestyle has rendered their legs -- and brains -- useless.

I didn't feel it was that far of a leap from where we are now. It's not that hard to picture a group of people in a public place where no one is talking or noticing each other. We have a lot of free time on our hands. We're consumed by distraction.

You're a child of the '70s, and movies like "2001," "Blade Runner" and "Star Wars" feel like big influences here.

I don't know if it's me getting older and crabbier or if it really happened, but I felt like somewhere after "Blade Runner" and "Aliens," I wasn't seeing the kinds of movies that transported me to space and contained a certain level of awe and wonder. They used to come out every year.

I told my crew I wanted it to feel like we found this film can with "Wall E" in it on some shelf and it was made in the '70s and we just restored it.

You talk about being older, crabbier and, in past conversations, more cynical. Yet "Wall E" and "Nemo" are probably the most heartfelt movies I've seen this decade.

(Laughs) Movies are my confessional. They reveal the movie romantic in me that's completely all-consuming in my head. But I certainly cover it with a lot of cynicism during the day.

I think it came from growing up in Massachusetts and not wanting to have the (stuffing) kicked out of me. You don't show your romantic colors in blue-collar New England.

"Wall E" contains some live-action elements -- the "Hello, Dolly!" segments and Fred Willard. Will you move further in that direction with your next project, (an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs') "John Carter of Mars"?

Invariably it will be a hybrid of live-action and CG. We haven't talked about how to attack it yet. One thing I've learned at Pixar is don't waste your time in the first year even talking about how it's going to look. That's easier to achieve. Spend all your time making the story as good as it can be.

Are movies like "John Carter" a way for Pixar to keep evolving?

There's a trust in the Pixar brand. We've built that. We will be doing different things, too. If we come up with a great idea and it turns out to be an R-rated picture, we'll probably find a different way to distribute it.

Maybe you could still use Luxo Jr. (the lamp that's Pixar's logo) but just put a red light in it.

(Laughs) That's a good, viable option. Fortunately, we haven't had that discussion yet.

Glenn Whipp, [phone] [e-mail]

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Photo:

(1 -- color) no caption (Wall E)

(2) Pushing the envelope of what an animated movie can be, Pixar's new film, "WallE," a love story starring robots, has no words in its first half hour, only sound designer Ben Burtt's beeps and whistles.