Showbiz 7s: Movies that inspired 'Wall-E'

By Denise Martin, Special to The Times

There’s no denying it. Wall-E does bear more than a passing resemblance to No. 5, the military-built robot on the run in "Short Circuit.” But the similarities end there, says “Wall-E” director Andrew Stanton, who says his latest is “first and foremost, a love story.”

“I wanted this movie, about Earth’s last robot, to transport you to another world, give you that sense of awe that’s hard to come by today,” he says. In running down Stanton’s list of movies that inspired “Wall-E,” it’s pretty clear that they’re all, shall we say, far removed from the 1986 Steve Guttenberg-Fisher Stevens comedy.

And for the record, Stanton dreamed up the look of Wall-E while at a 2003 playoff game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland A’s. “I asked someone for a pair of binoculars and missed a couple innings because of it,” he recalls. “I was busy trying to make the binoculars laugh, smile, look sad…”