Out There:

Production Designer Ralph Eggleston'S

Fantastic Visions Of Earth And Space

The production design for "WALL-E" required a unique cinematic vision of the future that ran the gamut -- from an abandoned trash-covered Earth to an enormous floating cruise ship in space perched on the edge of a nebula that is home to thousands of humans. Overseeing the production design on the film was Ralph Eggleston ("Finding Nemo"), a Pixar veteran with art director credits on "Toy Story" and "The Incredibles," and who directed the Oscar®-winning short, "For the Birds." Working closely with him to achieve his artistic goals were three top art directors: Anthony Christov (sets art director), Bert Berry (shading art director), and Jason Deamer (character art director).

"We find our own sense of world and create it from scratch."

~ Ralph Eggleston, Production Designer

According to producer Morris, "The biggest overall challenge on this film from my point of view was the production design and locking down the look of our sets and environments. We knew going into it that we needed to have a future incarnation of Earth in its abandoned state, but it was enormously complicated to get all the detailed nooks and crannies figured out. The design of the Axiom and the space environments were also tricky, but we had a larger body of material for those elements to research and learn from. Ralph and his team did an amazing job creating entertaining and intriguing worlds that became characters in their own right and helped Andrew tell the story he wanted to tell."

"One of the great things about what Pixar does," explains Eggleston, "is that we create animated films that also have elements of special effects films and live-action films. We find our own sense of world and create it from scratch. With 'WALL-E,' it was essential that the audience believe in this world or they would have a hard time believing that our main character is really the last robot on Earth. So we set out to make our Earth setting very realistic with a great level of detail. We created nearly six miles of cityscape so that everywhere WALL-E goes, we know exactly where it is and that world really exists. We ended up stylizing it quite a bit for animation, but these are the most realistic settings we've ever created here at Pixar. This was also our toughest assignment from an artistic standpoint.

"Another one of our goals on this film was to use color and lighting to highlight WALL-E's emotions and help the audience connect with them," he adds. "Act one is all about romantic and emotional lighting, and act two is very much about sterility, order and cleanliness. The second act is the direct antithesis of the first. As the film progresses, we slowly but surely introduce a little bit more romantic lighting. A big part of my job is wrangling all of these disparate ideas from the art department all the way through the production pipeline."

For inspiration in creating the look of outer space for "WALL-E," Eggleston and his team turned to idealized views of the future from NASA scientists of the 50s and 60s, and the concept art for Disneyland's Tomorrowland.

"One of the biggest influences for me and everyone on the film in terms of creating our vision of the future was the art created for Tomorrowland," explains Eggleston. "It wasn't about the specifics, but rather the notion of 'Where's my jet pack?' You look at a lot of the space program paintings of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and you see fantastic imagery of buildings on Mars. Somewhere around 1978, they stopped doing that because they wouldn't fund anything that they knew they couldn't do. We were interested in showing what the future could be like and won't it be great when we get there. That's what we wanted to impart with a lot of the design of this film."

Inspiration for the Axiom design came from researching luxury cruise ships, including those operated by Disney. Field trips to Vegas also helped to suggest practical lighting for an artificial luxury setting.

"The original concept for the Axiom came from a cruise line," says Eggleston. "We designed a massive space ship that is as big as a city, several miles long, and capable of holding hundreds of thousands of residents. We knew that the audience would need some kind of visual grounding, so we put it next to a nebula. When we first see the nebula, it reminds you of a mountain with something on top, and then it reveals the Axiom."

Movie search