WALL-E - Environmental Storytelling!

As part of my environmental project I thought that I would look at Wall-E as it has no dialogue for the first half an hour and relies entirely on visuals to keep the narrative going. To develop my understanding further I also took out the book 'The Art of Wall-E' to give me a deeper insight into the creative decisions that were made and why.

The animation involves two completely different worlds, the spaceship and planet Earth. Earth is a wasteland and full of rubbish and dirt so to make it visually appealing would be quite difficult, the crew at Pixar said that they actually looked at a lot of photography of abandoned places such as Chernobyl. As the environments that the characters are in sets the tone and atmosphere it's important to carefully plan out each world and 'the more you know, the more believable your story can be' (Andrew Stanton at Pixar).



In the image above, Pixar have managed to create a world of litter and waste and still manage to make it seem like a place you would want to explore. By careful use of colour pallete they wanted to make it look like Earth but be careful not to make it look like Mars. In this shot above I really liked how they use their environments as part of the story and not just as the background for the action, in this shot the characters are watching the beautiful sunset yet still in a wasteland.

There is a one minute long scene in the film called "the walk home" which uses ten different sets and production designer at Pixar said they were 'the most complicated, largest series of ten sets'. Below I have put the clip showing the different sets they used and I really liked this little scene in the film, even though it was very short it was important to show the audience a little piece of Wall-E's world. Earth has been represented here as more of a wasteland rather than just a dump and I really liked to see how they had laid out the different sets when it comes to cinematography. One of the shots I really liked was the gods eye point of view shot as it accentuates the vast scale of the litter and waste as well as drawing the attention on how tiny Wall-E is in the world.