World According to WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, Ben Burtt and the Cast
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Friday, June 27, 2008
Fred Willard on being the only non-animated character:
“As an actor I love it of course, because you don’t want to be anonymous. I’ve done voices in movies. Actually I was in Monster House and I looked at my character they drew for me and I said, ‘I like the character better than me. He’s more expressive.’ But it’s fun to be the only person.”
Ben Burtt on WALL-E’s sound props:
There were more sound files in WALL-E then any single feature film I’ve worked on, about 2500. Because every character has a set of sounds and there are lots of movement and dense activities. Stories of sounds, well let’s see – WALL-E’s treads, he drives around he goes different speeds, when he’s going slowly he makes a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said I like that generator sound, that is cool and so where can I get one? I found one on ebay. I bought it. It came in its original 1949 box so we could take that into the studio and perform with it to tailor it to the speed of WALL-E. But that’s only good when WALL-E is going slow. When WALL-E is going fast he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again I went back to my memory of things. I had recorded Biplanes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s biplanes have an inertia starter, it is a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up, you do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I’m going to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a biplane into the studio but on ebay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, brought it in.