The first version of the new Wall-E trailer to appear has sprung from France - but, of course, there's now dialogue so only the captions are affected. Download it directly and then enjoy it immensely.
It took a bit of work to crack this one, I have to admit. But now I have.
[EDIT: And if that link doesn't work for you - it does for me - there's an alternative you can try]
The Cooked Art blog have a great report from the Wall-E panel at Comic-Con. You really should read it.
Here's an excerpt:
Ben Burtt (the legendary sound designer) then went on to talk about how there is no dialogue in the film in a normal sense, showing a great featurette using pastels and digital paintings and sound to evoke the moods that would be felt while watching Wall-E.
Then, using a piano, went on to demonstrate the range of sounds that Wall-E and his wanted companion, Eve, could make. With these same range of sounds they displayed Wall E and Eve both in their own animation scene (unrendered, but very well animated).
To contrast Wall E, who is essentially a cube with binoculars and treads (which can fold up into his body so he's then essentially a cube), EVE is based on circles and ovals - EVE's head is a floating sphere and its body is an upside-down teardrop. Wall-E is rustic and worker class, EVE is sleek, white, and smooth. Stanton said that Wall-E's design was inspired by Luxo, but he didn't feel Luxo's design could hold an audience, so he wanted to play around with eyes, and during a baseball game, saw some binoculars and made it into Wall E.
They also break down a 10-minute sequence with a fair amount of detail.
JVPixar has uploaded a brilliant Wall-E teaser to YouTube.
This one comes from the Ratatouille videogame, but it actually reveals plenty of details not in the original, 'official' Wall-E trailer.
Is there anybody out there capable of making a better version? Something in higher resolution and not uploaded to a video sharing site?
[EDIT: This is all the result of a scooper seeing an inaccurate Apple RSS feed to update users of their new trailers. Apple have listed the cast of Mr. Bean's Holiday as the cast of Wall-E and a film ick reader supposed they had it right. Why wouldn't they? As this source is one of my best, I took their comments on face value - and as it happens, they were right, it's Apple that weren't. Either that or Apple were right too and, yes, Wall-E has the same cast as the Bean sequel]
You wouldn't know it from the trailer but the cast of Wall-E includes Rowan Atkinson, Emma de Caunes and Willem Dafoe [EDIT: ...or not] - alongside Fred Willard, making the first live action appearance in Pixar history.
Spoilers follow. No idea who will be playing what, so far - but I'd take a wild shot at Emma de Caunes being the voice of the female robot and Atkinson and Dafoe perhaps playing humans in the later sequences - where there is some dialogue, eventually. Willard is definitely playing the CEO of the Buy'n'Large corporation, chief culprits in destroying the Earth.
[EDIT: To make up for the error at the heart of this post, here's a reminder that might well cheer you. Barbra Streisand is in Wall-E. Don't forget that astonishing fact]
I recently linked to an article on the Time website called Why Pixar is Better. Now, the industrious uberfans at JV Pixar News have found out from the similarly keen and sharp Upcoming Pixar that the print version of the piece contains a lot more information. Superb.
There is information on Wall-E, Toy Story 3 and Up. Here's a snippet of each.
On Wall-E: Those who remember the 1931 Charlie Chaplin film [City Lights], about a blind girl wooed by a tramp she mistakenly believes is a rich man, can transpose the story to a lonely planet and guess from there.
On Toy Story 3: "We got an idea we thought would be really great." Lee Unkrich will be THE director....he co-directed Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo. He says, "We're just starting to write the story"....and confides, "I wake up evey morning hoping for a eureka moment.
On Up: Pete Docter and co-director Bob Peterson are preparing this 'coming-of-old-age story' about a seventysomething guy who lives in a house that "looks like your grand-parents' house smelled." He befriends a clueless young Wilderness Ranger and gets into lots of alter kocker altercations. Says Pixar: "Our hero travels the globe, fights beasts and villains and eats dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon."
- Here's a team up for you: a film written and directed by Harold Ramis, produced by Judd Apatow and starring Jack Black and Michael Cera. Throw in Owen Wilson as executive producer and co-writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenerg and you're coming close to the entire opening credits of Year One.
- Also very interesting in the same Variety piece is the mention of Be Kind, Rewind being released this year.
- SuperheroHype have Lexi Alexander as the frontrunner for the Punisher 2 job, not John Dahl. That's the Punisher's loss.
- The Friends of English Magic have seen a nearly complete version of Stardust and... surprise surprise, they loved it.
- Bad Santa/Bad News Bears/Cats and Dogs screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Recqua (one out of three 'aint... er... good) have written and are to direct a based-on-a-true-story prison-break film for Luc Besson's Europacorp. I Love You Phillip Morris film is to star Jim Carrey as a married who father who ends up in prison, falls in love with his cellmate and then, once this cellmate is released, breaks out of prison four times to be with him.
- There's still likely to be a GI Joe movie, of course. Why - of course. There's bound to be a film about just about every brandnamed toy eventually.
- Legendary Pictures' Thomas Tull is co-founding the first videogame publisher to literally eat, breathe and sleep Hollywood. Not only will Brash Entertainment be Hollywood residents, every game they publish will be licensed from other films, TV and music properties.
- Luke and Jeremy Jackson have received a big shot of publicity by casting Tobin bell in their film Highway 61. I rather liked Bruce McDonald's Highway 61. In fact, I quite like all of the Bruce McDonald films I've seen (Highway 61, Roadkill and Hard Core Logo). He's one of my favourite directors of music-based films (music based in terms of content, not form). Any other Bruce McDonald fans out there?
- Kimberley Elise has been cast as Forrest Whitaker's character's wife in The Great Debaters, Nate Parker as his son.
- Kevin Bacon is to appear in Frost/Nixon as Jack Brennan, Nixon's chief of staff.
- Ginnifer Goodwin, Matthew Perry, Hilary Swank and Ben Foster say direct-to-DVD, I'm afraid. But they're the cast in place for Craig Lucas' Laws of Motion. Best of luck to you all.
- When a news story features both the word Lips and the word Transformers in the title, this isn't what many would be expecting.
- Aimee Mann's soundtrack to Magnolia is the best thing about the whole film. She's written a piece about Sgt. Pepper's for the NYTimes - which prompted me to think... why on earth wasn't Across the Universe slotted in for release on last Friday?
- Ratatouille has wrapped and the good people of Pixar had a party to mark the occaison. Amonsgt the other wrap party business, they found time to watch Lifted, the Wal-E teaser and a featurette on how motion capture was (surprisingly) used in the making of Ratatouille. I found the link at UpcomingPixar.
- Tim Story has given an interview to Blackfilm regarding his Fantastic Four sequel.
- Chitty Chitty Bang Bang herself has reached over half a million dollars at auction.
- I wish the Battlestar Galactica staffers could agree how long they've been planning to wrap up the show after the fourth season.
- Cinema Blend don't seem to like film ick much. Ah well. film ick doesn't care. They've just attributed my Death story to Cinematical. Cinematical included a film ick link, Cinema Blend really couldn't have missed it. Charming.
- Variety are calling the next Denise Richards film, A Beautiful Life 'edgy' and 'indie'. She'll be nude, reportedly: I'm calling it an exploitation film. Which of us is right? Probably neither. Or both.
- The English language street racing film Fast Track, No Limits is in production now in Berlin. Will it ever see the inside of an American cinema?
- Oskar Santos directed the making-of doc about Alejandro Amenebar's The Sea Inside. To return the favour, Amenebar is now producing Santos' feature debut, El Mal Ajeno. Good karma.
- Stardust now has a MySpace account.
- Eli Roth has blogged on joining The Masters of Horror. Not the TV series, mind, the dinner circle that spawned it. Of course, now that Lionsgate have picked up the Masters reins, it doesn't seem too unlikely that Roth will be joining the ranks for season three.
- Cool Toy Review are reporting that Lego will be creating tie-in toys for Indiana Jones and the Last Merchandising Hurrah. That may well mean a Lego Indiana Jones videogame or two, too.
- Nikki Finke describes Hostel 2 as 'disgusting'. There's no evidence at all she has even seen it. Why not be outraged and e-mail her a challenge? Such a venomous spitball of reactionary hate deserves some kind of rebuttal.
- UpcomingHorrrorMovies have some stills from the direct-to-DVD Return to the House on Haunted Hill. It certainly looks direct-to-DVD.
- Hideo Nakata is to direct Inhuman. Am I alone in thinking Nakata is not really anything special?
- I had assumed David Hyde Pierce was out all along. I'm glad he's not stayed in, anyways.
- According to JV Pixar News, the Ratatouille video game (of which you can see the trailer now) will contain the first teaser footage for Wal-E.
- The IESB have nine clips from Ocean's 13.
- Is Damien Hirst angling for a production design gig on the next Indiana Jones?
- Gamervision will teach you how to make a Zoidberg Mii. Genius.
- The Sun are now reporting that Dr. Who is to come to an end (again) next year. I don't believe a word of it.
- The West End engagement of the Mary Poppins musical is to wrap up early next year. I'll need to get my skates on, then. I'm not joking - I really want to see it.
- Both Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella are to produce The Silver Linings Playbook - are either of them to direct? If so - Pollack, please.
A flickr user called 'inkista' has taken a few snaps of a Wall-E model on display at Disneyland, which you can see below. They offer us a very good look at his anatomy, for want of a better word - and the item he's holding in his hand gives some idea, I think of his hobbies on the abandoned Earth of the future. Poor old Wall-E.
You might want to flick through the snapper's other pics of things they saw on their day at the theme park. There's a couple of Ratatouille sculpts.
At Disney they have meetings, and in meetings they use Powerpoint, and from a Powerpoint slide show came all of the above. The artwork you can is all pre-production work for Prince of Persia, which suggests things have moved along somewhat on that one already. All can be clicked an enlarged, so grab your mouse and knock yourself out.
Jim Hill have provided a very exciting breakdown of the first act of Andrew Stanton and Pixar's upcoming Wall-E. The short version: this film sounds truly incredible.
The not so short version: amongst other things, the report reveals just what the name Wall-E means, where and when the film is set, who the lead characters are plenty more spoilerific stuff. Below are a few choice excerpts, which you may read at your peril, or you might prefer to simply get the full-fat version straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak).
Our story opens on Earth in the year 2700. Which -- due to the horrible way that humans have treated this planet -- is now just one massive trash heap floating in space.
...mankind has abandoned the planet. We're now all living aboard the Axiom, this massive spaceship that circles high overhead.
...mankind hired this enormous, inept corporation -- Buynlarge -- to supervise the clean-up effort. And that company -- in turn -- sent hundreds of thousands of robots down to the planet's surface to pick up all of the trash.
But Buynlarge's Waste Allocation Load Lifters -- Earth Class units really weren't up to the task. And so -- over the centuries -- these robots slowly began breaking down. Until now... there's only one WALL E left running on the entire planet.
Over the past 700 years, WALL E has gotten ... quirky. To be specific, he's become somewhat self-aware & curious... WALL E has collected an amazing array of human artifacts. Things like a Rubik's Cube, a lightbulb, a Playmate portable ice chest. But this robot's proudest possession is an old VCR. On which he plays -- over and over again -- a VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!...wait 'til you see what happens to WALL E once he gets on board the Axiom and finds out what has become of mankind. How -- because humans have grown even more lazy in the 700 years that they've been off Earth -- we're all now just these enormous fat blobs who can only move about because we travel in huge floating lounge chairs.
There are so many other aspects... that are daring and/or charming. Take -- for example -- Fred Willard's involvment with this production. Fred plays the president of the Buynlarge Corporation. And this will be the very first time that a really-for-real human performer will appear in a Pixar production.
Reuters have the straight scoop from a Disney-Pixar press conference. Most exciting news? That Lee Unkrich is directing Toy Story 3 from a script by Michael Arndt, the screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine. Unkrich is Pixar's master of montage and was a co-director on Toy Story 2.
Several clips and pre-production reels were shown from a number of films, including Ratatouille, Wall-E, Toy Story 3 and Chris Sanders' feared-dead An American Dog.
Ed Catmull confirmed that hand-drawn animation was indeed retruning to Disney, but that the 'main studio', Walt Disney Feature Animation, would also be making CG films quite seperately from Pixar's.
I'd open a bottle of champagne if I had one.
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