10 Space-Age Facts About WALL·E

Ah, WALL·E: The movie that made a cockroach cute—and had us all sobbing about a trash compactor. Join us as we travel to infinity and beyond (hey, it’s from another Pixar movie, but it works) with these 10 facts about WALL·E on its 10th anniversary.

1. WALL·E AND R2-D2 ARE PLAYED BY THE SAME ACTOR.

The “voice” of WALL·E is legendary sound designer Ben Burtt. Burtt is best known for his work on Star Wars (you can go ahead and thank him for R2-D2’s distinctive chatter), though he’s worked on films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the Indiana Jones series as well.

2. ALIEN REFERENCES ABOUND.

The film boasts not one but two connections to Alien, which was one of writer-director Andrew Stanton’s inspirations for the film. Early in his career Ben Burtt worked on the movie, “mak[ing] sounds for the mother computer and that sort of thing.” WALL·E’s own version of “Mother,” the main computer on the starliner Axiom, is voiced by none other than Alien star Sigourney Weaver. “I waited until the movie was kind of done to make sure she wouldn’t think I was crazy when she saw the movie, but she was a huge fan,” Stanton said. “I really lucked out and she loved doing it. She got the in joke.”

3. THE DIRECTOR CAME UP WITH WALL·E’S LOOK AT A BASEBALL GAME.

Stanton got the inspiration for WALL·E’s design when someone handed him a pair of binoculars at a baseball game. “I missed the entire inning,” he recalled. “I just turned the thing around and I started staring at it and I started making it go sad and then happy and then mad and then sad and I remembered doing that as a kid with my dad’s binoculars and I said, ‘It’s all there.’”

4. THERE WAS A “NO ELBOWS” RULE.

In coming up with the look of WALL·E, the film’s design team operated under a “no elbows” rule; though elbows would make it easier for WALL·E to express himself, as a trash compactor robot there’d be no practical reason for him to have them. “Doctor Octopus-style” antenna arms and collapsible, telescope-like appendages were considered before the designers settled on the ultimate design, inspired by inkjet printers.

5. THERE’S A FAMILY CONNECTION TO HELLO, DOLLY.

Thomas Newman, who composed WALL·E’s score, is the nephew of composer Lionel Newman, who just so happens to have co-scored Hello, Dolly, which appears prominently in WALL·E as it’s WALL·E’s favorite movie.

6. BEN BURTT CREATED A RECORD NUMBER OF SOUNDS FOR THE FILM.

Ben Burtt created a library of 2400 sounds for WALL·E—the largest number of all of his films by far. Among the raw sounds Burtt used in WALL·E are an electric toothbrush, shopping carts banging together, a Nikon camera shutter (for WALL·E’s eyebrow movements), Burtt sneezing while a vacuum cleaner was running (WALL·E sneezing), and a hand-cranked generator of the sort used in the John Wayne film Island in the Sky.

7. WALL·E’S COCKROACH FRIEND WAS NAMED AFTER A HOLLYWOOD GREAT.

Though not named in the film itself, WALL·E’s cockroach friend was given the name Hal by the Pixar team, a reference to both 1920s producer Hal Roach (Safety Last!, The Little Rascals) and the homicidal-minded computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

8. THE HUMANS WERE ORIGINALLY GOING TO BE JELL-O BLOBS.

Inspired by conversations with NASA scientist Jim Hicks, an expert on the effects of zero gravity on the human body, at one point Stanton was going to make humans literal blobs, so unrecognizable from who we are today that “even we the audience would think it was an alien race. It had more of a Planet of the Apes twist, and they at the end would discover, as well as we would, that it’s actually us.” But, he added, “it was so bizarre that I had to sort of pull back.”

9. A LEGENDARY CINEMATOGRAPHER HELPED STRETCH WALL·E TO NEW TECHNICAL HEIGHTS.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who has been nominated for a whopping 12 Oscars, served as a visual consultant on WALL·E, helping the animators figure out how to make the movie look like it was filmed with actual cameras. “Very often, animated films feel like they’re recorded in some kind of computer space,” producer Jim Morris noted. “We wanted this film to feel like cinematographers with real cameras had gone to these places and filmed what we were seeing. We wanted it to have artifacts of photography and to seem real and much more gritty than animated films tend to be.”

10. THERE ARE EASTER EGGS GALORE! 

It’s a Pixar movie, so you know there are a lot of Easter eggs. Among them: Hamm the pig and Rex the dinosaur from Toy Story, plus Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., can be seen in WALL·E’s truck near the beginning of the film. Skinner’s scooter from Ratatouille and the Pizza Planet truck are rusting in one of Earth’s many trash heaps. A reference to “A113,” a classroom at CalArts where many Pixar animators studied, can be found in every Pixar movie, and WALL·E gave it what Stanton called its “most obvious” placement: as the name of the directive that states humans can never go back to Earth. And when WALL·E creates a statue of Eve, the lamp he uses for her arm is none other than the star of Oscar-winning Pixar short Luxo Jr.