February 22, 2009 – Pixar’s Wall-E Wins the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
Andrew Stanton (R) with the Wall-E Academy Award. Image Credit: Wikipedia
“[We’ve] been trying for four years to make the best film possible and have it recognized in that regard in something like this – it’s huge.” – Andrew Stanton at the Academy Awards
At the 81st Academy Awards, broadcast February 22, 2009, the Pixar film Wall-E won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The film was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay (written by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, and Pete Docter), Best Original Score (by Thomas Newman), Best Original Song (Down to Earth by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman), Best Sound Editing (by Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood), and Best Sound Mixing (by Tom Meyer, Michael Semanick, and Ben Burtt). This award would be the fourth win for Pixar in this category since the creation of the Best Animated Feature category in 2001. Many critics voiced their surprise that Wall-E was not nominated for Best Picture, as it was one of the highest rated films of 2008, with a 96 percent approval rating on the online rating site, Rotten Tomatoes. Only three animated films were nominated in the Best Animated Feature category that year: Wall-E, Disney’s Bolt, and Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda.
Image from one of the first advertisements for Wall-E
In an advertisement for the film, shortly after the release of Ratatouille, Andrew Stanton described a lunch with three of the other main players at Pixar: John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft. “In the summer of 1994,” he begins, “there was a lunch…Toy Story was almost complete, and we thought, ‘Well, jeez, if we’re going to make another movie, we gotta get started now.’ So at that lunch, we knocked around a bunch of ideas that eventually became A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo…the last one we talked about that day was the story of a robot, named Wall-E.”
Released on June 27, 2008, the film posed the question: What if mankind had to leave Earth 700 years in the future, and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot? The film includes the voices of Ben Burtt as Wall-E and Elissa Knight as EVE, with Jeff Garlin as the Captain, John Ratzenberger as John, and Kathy Najimy as Mary. The film went on to become the ninth highest grossing film of 2008, with a total domestic gross of $223,808,164.
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