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Would you say that's also the same story in Finding Nemo?

Stanton: Actually, I wouldn't say that. I'm not saying that Nemo didn't touch on that, but to me, that movie was more about faith and about dealing with your fears.

When EVE arrives, WALL•E is smitten

Talk a bit about what it's like to work at Pixar. Do you and the others have sort of a friendly competition, trying to beat each other at the box office?

Stanton: Actually it's the opposite. We're always egging each other on to make best film possible. It's very supportive, although it's not always easy, because we're all very honest with each other with constructive criticism. It's like we're all on the same team, and if the whole team wins, then a place like Pixar will not have to go away.

We all get together every 4-6 months to look at each other's films. It's not some sort of tribunal or anything. It's almost like a writers' room kind of feel, where you get a chance for objectivity from others. If you work on something alone too long, it's like staring at yourself in the mirror—you stare too long, and you start seeing a million things wrong, and you start changing things just because you can. So you need your peers—somebody you can trust creatively—who can say, "I think this is great, don't change it," or, "This is not working as much as you think so change it."

WALL•E, like other Pixar movies, connects with all ages. Is that intentional?

Stanton: One thing that's a blessing at Pixar is that ever since Toy Story, we've made the films we wanted to make. When making Toy Story, we first started out by trying to please all these executives at Disney—and it failed. And in this last-ditch effort for fear of having the film shut down, we sort of locked ourselves in our room and just made what we would want to see. And that became the Toy Story that everybody knows.

So we've decided ever since then to just listen to the audience member in ourselves, and not worry about the demographics. I'm a family man, I have kids, and I go to the movies. And I'm just going to make the kind of movie I want to see. And if it doesn't match perfectly for somebody else, so be it, but at least it's an artist being pure with their vision.

Apparently the idea for WALL•E was first born in 1994?

Stanton: At the time, it wasn't a whole story. It was just the foundation of a great character—and it was literally born from the sentence, "What if humankind left earth and somebody left the last robot on, and it just kept doing the same futile thing forever?" And I thought that was the saddest, loneliest character I ever heard of in my life. [Co-writer] Pete Docter and I loved that idea, and thought we'd love to see a movie like that.

WALL•E doesn't know what to make of the Rubik's cube

But since we hadn't even finished Toy Story yet, our next sentence was, "Nobody would ever let us make a movie like that." And we put it on the shelf and got caught up doing all these other things. But the idea stayed with me all these years, and when I was writing on Nemo, I started thinking about WALL•E again—and I couldn't stop. That's when I realized that I was attracted to the pure loneliness of this character, and the opposite of loneliness is love—so it should be a love story. From then on, suddenly the skies opened and I just couldn't stop writing.

It is a wonderful love story. But at the same time, it seemed to have heavier social commentary than most Pixar films. It seemed like a story about fat, lazy, American consumers who don't care about the environment and …

Stanton: That's your interpretation, but that's not where I was coming from. I certainly see the parallels, but honestly, all those factors came from very different places. All my choices in the film came from what I needed to amplify the main point, which was the love story between these robots. The theme that I was trying to tap into was that irrational love defeats life's programming—that it takes a random act of loving kindness to kick us out of our routines and habit.

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