BURN-E: An interview with director Angus MacLane

Last week, we had an opportunity to participate in an online Q&A with Angus MacLane, directing animator on WALL-E and director of BURN-E a hilarious new short film created exclusively for the DVD and Blu-ray releases. Angus joined the Pixar team back in 1997, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been a contributing animator on A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Ratatouille. He was kind enough to take time an answer questions from an array of international press outlets, including Cinema Verdict.

Q: What did the role of directing animator on WALL-E involve?

AM: The Directing Animator’s job is to help the other animators keep their animation on model, so that the acting and movement are consistent for each of the characters over the entire film. They work to be both a surrogate voice of the Director when he/she is available, and also offer acting and performance suggestions. Directing Animators also help to define the motion and character of the main characters in the film. The Directing Animator reports directly to the Supervising Animators. On WALL-E, as well as The Incredibles, I worked under the Supervision Animators Alan Barillaro and Steven Hunter. They interface more with the production staff about the direction and management of the WALL-E animation department. They also serve as both a surrogate voice of the Director and also offer acting and performance suggestions as well. Time permitting, Supervising Animators will also help to define the motion and character of the main characters in the film.


Q: The WALL-E acronym stood for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class.” What is BURN-E short for?

AM: BURN-E stands for “Basic Utility Repair Nano Engineer.” I have since heard from some people that it should actually be BURN-A because the “E” in WALL-E stands for “Earth-Class” and the “A” would be the appropriate “Axiom-Class.” Now I could argue that BURN-E was a robot on Earth that was installed on the Axiom, but a) I would be lying, and b) What’s the point? If that’s the biggest problem you have with the film, then I have done my job. Now put yourself in my shoes. You have to name this robot. BURN-E is funny and breaks the continuity of the film. BURN-A is more accurate to the feature and is not funny at all. Which would you choose? I thought so. I do love that geeks pick up on this and I am happy to be creating this controversy. I’d probably do the same thing, were I not involved. Jim Reardon, head of story on WALL-E, thought of the name. Derek Thompson and fellow story artist Ted Mathot came up with the acronym.

Q: Brad Bird created the similarly fun companion short Jack-Jack Attack for The Incredibles. What are your thoughts on side-stories like these?

AM: I am a big fan of side stories. Coincidentally, I had a side story pitch for The Incredibles that Brad was excited about, but budget constraints kept us from doing it. I think it’s important that the side story not belittle or betray the main story. If the main story is about the existence of the Easter Bunny, the side story can’t say there is no Easter Bunny or it messes with the feature.

Q: What made you choose BURN-E as the main subject?

AM: I was drawn to BURN-E because his story was not fully explored in the feature. I like M-O, but he is in the feature a lot already, so I did not feel like his story needed to be told as urgently. Also I liked the idea of having a short that took place outside the central story arc of WALL-E.


Q: How did BURN-E’s story originate?

AM: As a filmgoer, I wanted to know what happened to BURN-E. I had a few ideas of places we could cut back to BURN-E in the feature, but it slowed the pace of the film down. Once Andrew encouraged me to take these ideas and develop them into a short, I needed to find a unifying story arc. I came up with this idea of him having a job and that job would be repairing this light. Then I thought, it would be funny to have WALL-E inadvertently cause this meteor to hit the light on the ship. This led to the central idea of the short. In the feature, WALL-E has a positive effect on everyone he meets. So I thought, what if there is someone for whom WALL-E ‘s arrival on the Axiom isn’t a good thing. WALL-E is never purposefully mean to BURN-E, it’s just bad luck. Once I had that central idea I looked for key moments in the film to cut back to BURN-E to see what he was doing at that particular time.

Q: How hard was it to get the just right type of emotion out of a robot?

AM: It is always our goal as animators to make our work clearly communicate the thought process of the characters to the audience. It was particularly challenging for us on BURN-E as well as WALL-E because of the limited nature of the designs and the lack of dialogue. Both characters limited designs are appealing, but more work must be done in the story process to communicate his intentions. With BURN-E and with WALL-E, if the audience can’t tell what the character is thinking or what is going on, then they lose interest very quickly.

Q: Did you work on BURN-E during or after the production of WALL-E?

AM: Both. I started boarding BURN-E on the evenings and lunches when we were in the heat of animation production on WALL-E. Once the animation was wrapping up on the feature, production started on BURN-E. It dovetailed nicely, but I did have to put off a May vacation till August.

Q: How long did it take you to produce BURN-E?

AM: I first pitched the storyboard to Andrew Stanton in November 2007 and we finished production in late June 2008.


Q: BURN-E is your first film as a director. Do you see this film as a steppingstone towards directing features?

AM: BURN-E was a tremendous opportunity for me. The shorts program at Pixar is designed to be a training ground for potential future directors and new department heads. Sometimes that translates into directing features or heading departments on features and sometimes not. I have stories that I’d like to tell, so we’ll see what happens.

Q: How much freedom do you have at Pixar as a director on a little film like this?

AM: I pitched the film to Andrew and John Lasseter. Once they bought off on the concept, I was free to pretty much do as I wished. There were budget considerations, but there weren’t any compromises that hurt the film. I checked in with Andrew periodically and if there was anything that wasn’t reading or could be improved he would make notes. I would say that 95% of his notes made the film better. Mostly, he had notes on pacing. BURN-E, by nature, is fairly episodic. He had a lot of notes that kept the pace from slowing to a crawl. Freedom as a director is also the freedom to make a bad movie. I had the support of an extremely talented crew so anything that was bad they did there best to fix.

Q: John has previously said that Pixar’s shorts provide animators with the opportunity to experiment with new challenges outside the confines and limitations of a feature. Were there any particular technical or story challenges you set out to accomplish with BURN-E?

AM: The biggest challenge was how to make a 7+ minute film on a budget. I was allowed to make a film that long if it came in on budget. To be honest, I think the budget constraint helped. I wanted the film to look like a ’70s-’80s Sci-Fi films. On those films, they built awesome sets on limited budget. We used a lot of the same principles of repeated forms for BURN-E. As an homage, the floor grating in BURN-E is based on floor grating in featured in the movies Outland, Alien, and Aliens.

Q: What was the most challenging aspect of BURN-E?

AM: There were a lot of difficult shots to pull off in this film. From a technical perspective, the shot with WALL-E touching Saturn’s rings that transitions into the pebble meteor was the hardest to pull off. The Effects Supervisor, Bill Watral did a fabulous job stitching the shot from the film and a bunch of new elements that were on a literally planetary scale. On the performance side, the shot where SUPPLY-R drops the light on the ground was the trickiest to get right. There was something in the boards that was really funny that was extremely difficult to capture.

Q: Could you give a piece of advice to all those who start in this of the animation and dream of working in Pixar or on a project like this someday?

AM: Surround yourself with people whose work you admire and whose opinions you trust. In school, I worked really hard and sought out others who did the same. In your work, make sure that you are making something that you believe in. In BURN-E, I tried to have at least one thing in each shot that was true, real, or relatable. Make the world of your film believable and relatable and the audience will follow.

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