Disney/Pixar Writer/Director Andrew Stanton, whose last film, Finding Nemo, won the first-ever Best Animated Film Academy Award for a computer-generated movie, is back with Wall-E. Although Finding Nemo currently holds the record as Disney/Pixar's highest-grossing movie, Wall-E, which is riding a rocket of critical acclaim, could give that film a run for the money. That's good news for THQ, which has shipped Wall-E games for every gaming platform in tandem with the theatrical run.
Stanton was on hand at Pixar Animation Studio's pristine headquarters in Emeryville, CA to discuss with GameDaily BIZ how far the video game industry has come since he first entered the CGI business in 1990. Back then, the Boston native was the second animator and ninth employee at the start-up. The first movie he worked on, Toy Story, was nominated for a Best Writing, Best Screenplay Written for the Screen Oscar in 1996.
"I remember finishing Toy Story and thinking that they're going to be able to make video games that look as good as this," said Stanton. "And it's WAY passed that now. Now it's at this scary place where it's just lapping at the heels of what we do for the films. And it's only because of the manner in which they've got to use the technology so interactively that it's keeping it at all from matching or exceeding what we do. I think we're maybe months, years away from it being indiscernible."
Stanton has watched the game industry grow in large part through the eyes of his son, who was born while the animator was working on Toy Story.
"I have literally seen his involvement with computer graphics and particularly with games advance with each year as he gets more involved in playing games," said Stanton. "He's now 16 and very much a gamer. And I'm just constantly shocked at how good it looks."
Over the years, especially through its relationship with THQ, Pixar has become more involved in the production of games based on its properties.
"The biggest thing that we provide is just consistency," said Stanton. "We make sure that the same aesthetic or whatever rules that we've made for ourselves for the production of something match the game. It's not that they don't have the abilities or the talent to make a great looking game on their own, but everything, all this stuff, is just aesthetic choices that we've decided—the palate is going to be these colors, or that we're never going to make a character do this or whatever."
Because of the nature of Pixar's development cycle, which focuses on story and characters—even though many viewers marvel at the technology, Stanton said they just start out and sometimes things evolve into a broader rulebook of what that movie's particularly going to be about aesthetically. THQ usually enters the film process in the middle of production, since it can take four or more years to create a feature like Wall-E.
"They can't wait until the movie's done to then read from the final rulebook," said Stanton. "They have to sort of come in midstream and ask us 'what is it you guys are thinking of doing, why are you guys making it look like this?' And a lot of it isn't intuitive for them and it's really helpful that we check in with them every once in a while. We may have decided the character isn't going to look like that anymore, or that this set is here, or we've decided that we never make the character jump like that. We hope that it'll help so that when you do come play the game, you don't feel like it's made in a different universe, you feel like it's an extension of the universe that you got familiar with for about two hours on the screen."
With the challenge of having to create an interactive adventure that spans 12-plus hours of gameplay, THQ and its development teams often turn to Pixar looking for characters, sets and ideas that were ultimately left on the cutting room floor.