The movie is about Wall-E, a robot who has been left on an over-polluted and abandoned planet Earth in an attempt to clean up the planet for future generations. After 700 years alone, Wall-E hasn’t made much progress, but he has slowly developed a personality. Through glimpsing life on discarded televisions (apparently this TV footage will be in live-action, a Pixar first) he becomes lonely and desires companionship. His dream comes true when another robot is sent to earth to check the progress of the cleanup. The two robots fall in love (despite the fact that neither can speak), leave the planet, and what follows is a carefully guarded secret by the Pixar brass.

In addition to the experimentation with live-action and silent characters, Stanton is also trying to take animated cinematography and sound design to the next level with this project. He hired legendary multi-Oscar winning sound designer Ben Burtt to craft the soundscape of the movie and create a believable personality for the protagonist using only the beeps and gears of a machine (given that Ben Burtt designed the sounds for Star Wars and created the voice of R2D2, this shouldn’t be a problem). He also hired cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country For Old Men, The Shawshank Redemption) to over see the virtual lighting and photography for the project. Stanton wanted to create a visual style as close to real cinematography as possible and hired one of the true masters in the field to oversee this vision. On a technical level, Pixar’s movies have always been a step ahead of most CGI animated fair, but this decision should really take it to the next level.