Here is an interesting article about Wall-E, Pixar's next animated movie:

Once Stanton began to visualise his low-tech robot — Pixar's logo of the bouncing anglepoise lamp, Luxo, was another major inspiration — he decided Wall.E wouldn't work with conventional dialogue. He wanted his film to hark back to the sense of wonder, the epic vistas and post-apocalyptic melancholy of classic sci-fi. The result is that Wall.E, in a first for Pixar and indeed most modern-day blockbusters, has very little dialogue. The love story between the robots is mostly told visually and with their 'language' of whirrs and electronic beeps.

I love the fact that Pixar has enough self-confidence and courage to do something fairly unconventional like this. The pressure of their previous successes, not to mention from their parent Disney, has to be enormous.

Wall.E is first and foremost a love letter to science fiction, though. Its epic, post-apocalypic vision of an uninhabited Earth set hundreds of years into the future, thick with dust and towering stacks of rubbish, looks wonderfully real. "We wanted it to have the feeling that it had actually been filmed," says Morris. Using subtle details such as barrel distortion and lens flare, gave Wall.E the feel of the 70mm sci-fi films of the Seventies. For the first time Pixar also brought Academy Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and special-effects don Dennis Muren onboard. "We wanted to get the nuance of a live action film, and actually put mistakes in with zooms and framing to give it a more immediate feel."

Nice, lens flares on steroids.

The article also describes how the 'voices' of the robots were made. It's a good read.

(Via Kottke.)