To celebrate the imminent release of Wall-E, Yahoo recently asked users to rank the best animated films ever made. They had done the list before and nearly every position changed. People are fickle. Tastes evolve over the years and, of course, people love the new, so Kung Fu Panda and Enchanted had to find their way into the top ten. But the top film from the last time they compiled the list still hasn't changed. It's Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo. And, when they do the list next year, don't be surprised if Stanton has the top TWO positions. His Wall-E is about to hit theaters and the buzz couldn't be louder. He spoke to us recently about life with Pixar, a robot who doesn't talk, and what inspired one of the most anticipated films of the year.

THE DEADBOLT: That shot with Wall-E and Eve "dancing around" the Axiom - For me, that's what movies are all about.

ANDREW STANTON: That's awesome. That was certainly where a lot of this was born of - It was a love letter to all those things that I loved about going to the movies in the '70s.

THE DEADBOLT: Let's start there. What was your favorite movie as a kid?

STANTON: You know, it changed as a kid. It's SO typical, but I'm such a Star Wars kid. I just love Star Wars. But I gotta tell ya, the movie that really resonated with me and I don't think I understood as well as when I got older, but it remained in my top ten long enough to know that it really was the most resonant one of all was Close Encounters.

THE DEADBOLT: Have you seen it recently?

STANTON: Yeah. To be honest though, I've always been a fan of the original theatrical cut. I never wanted to go into the spaceship. I didn't think that it added anything. I don't think a movie before or since has caught such a perfect sense of wonder as that film.

THE DEADBOLT: It's interesting because, like the Pixar movies, Close Encounters doesn't spell everything out for you. Like you said about the ending - You don't need to be hit over the head.

STANTON: I kind of feel like there's actually a bigger satisfaction from, in a weird way, tricking the audience into using their brain more when they're watching a movie. I think audiences actually want to be more engaged mentally. They just don't want to know that they're doing it. I think that's part of your responsibility as a filmmaker - to try and engage them in that way.

THE DEADBOLT: Is that the overall belief of everyone at Pixar? I'm going to throw you probably the most compliment-filled question of my life, but I'm curious about your answer because it's something that everyone seems to wonder - What does Pixar do right that the other animation houses don't?

STANTON: We're all HUGE movie lovers, purist movie lovers. We just love cinema. It did something to us as kids. It called to us. It's not limited to just being lovers of animation. I think that's the doorway that we found our way into films, but it's a much broader canvas. We love cinema. The second is that I found a bunch of people that, even though we were very small, it was almost that weird chemistry where we just found the right guys and formed a band and it just worked. We just became SO much better artists together or apart. We challenged each other. We love to argue. We love to debate. It was that sort of Lennon-McCartney friction that just worked. And then, to add to that, we're not in Hollywood. We're in the Bay Area. We learned early on to get whatever direction or advice from the outside world, say "Sure, we'll do that", and hang up the phone and go with our gut. After a while, they just stopped telling us what to do and let us go with our gut. And I don't know if I've ever met anybody other than the people who work at Pixar that are bigger movie fans than we are. We eat it. We speak it. It's our language. We really trust that we should just be making movies for the film goer in ourselves. The audience member that's true in ourselves is the demographic we should be trying to listen to. We've always been making the movies that we wanted to see. We didn't have that "All ages, all inclusive" interest. We are our own demographic.

THE DEADBOLT: Even the most popular and successful bands worry about breaking up. Do you worry that the other shoe has to drop on this streak of success?

STANTON: That implies ego. It's not that we're devoid of ego, but we're just so confident in where we are and it's such a healthy place to grow as a filmmaker that nobody feels threatened. I actually trust that everyone is there watching my back. It's become self-fulfilling because we all recognized since the get-go that Pixar is this unique place that, frankly, shouldn't exist. And we realized that the chances of it existing again in our lifetime is pretty much zero. As long as we keep making great movies, this place will stay. So, it benefits me, even from the most selfish point of view, that everybody's movie is the best it can be. We always feel that there's a dearth of good movies and we want to add to the "good movies" that are out there. We do the same thing on our weekends. We get the family in the car and go to the movie theater and feel gypped if it's been a waste of our time. We don't want to add to that.

THE DEADBOLT: The first Wall-E preview played on that lunch where you and the team first scribbled down five ideas that would become five Pixar movies and this was the last one. How much of Wall-E was in place at that time?

STANTON: Well, that's a nice clean, little sound bite that works for a trailer. The truth is that lunch was primarily about coming up with A Bug's Life and that pretty much dominated that conversation. But before we kind of hit upon the Bug's idea, we threw a bunch of half-thoughts around. I remember it being more like settings or subject matters. I remember the ocean. I remember somebody talking about fears. And a slightly more formed idea was "The last robot on Earth still doing its job and not knowing it could stop." And that was it. There was no name. There was no story line. It was just that character. I remember being shocked at how immediately sad and lonely that character was and how much I empathized with him immediately. Here we were having beaten our heads against the wall trying to make Woody appealing and suddenly to see a sentence and it works. I went "Wow, how is that possible?" For a short couple weeks, Pete Docter and I kept fantasizing about why we liked it. We just naturally fell into the idea that it should be like Luxo Jr. or R2D2, speaking the way it was built. Wouldn't it be cool to watch a character like that for an entire film? As an animator and as a film goer, we just said "I'd love to see a film like that." But not having proven ourselves with Toy Story yet, the very next thing we said was "Nobody would ever let us do it." It kind of died after that. But it shows you the power of the conceit of the last robot on Earth. That alone stayed in the back of my brain and eight years later when I'm writing on Finding Nemo and I'm starting to think about what I want to do next and he came back into my head. I had learned enough by then that I realized that what was powerful was the loneliness aspect. The opposite of that is love. It should be a love story in sci-fi. And, suddenly, I couldn't stop myself from writing, which is very rare for me. It's a very arduous task. I took that as a sign that it was what I had to do next.

THE DEADBOLT: This was while you were doing Nemo? I read in another interview that the music changed when Triplets of Belleville came out and I was startled that Wall-E was that far along that long ago.

STANTON: Well, for Hello Dolly. [Two songs from the musical are featured prominently in Wall-E.] I hadn't done anything other than write a lot of notes and put a lot of things on cards. I put up a big billboard and it's like pinning what's in your head on the wall so you won't forget it. I already knew that I was going to possibly open on space and have old-fashioned music and had started dabbling with French swing music. By the time Triplets came out, here's this great, amazing, pantomime film that has French swing music. I was like "There goes that." But it forced me to look at other old-fashioned styles of music and I went through standards, which led me to musicals, and I stumbled across Hello Dolly, which was the weirdest idea I ever had. But it worked.

EXCLUSIVE: Jumping the Wall with Andrew Stanton Page 2