“What if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?” This was the question Andrew Stanton posed at a now famous lunch in 1994, where, following the success of Toy Story, he and fellow Pixar pioneers Jon Lasseter, Pete Doctor and the late Joe Ranft discussed ideas for their next projects. The films that came out of this lunch were A Bug’s Life, Monster’s Inc., Finding Nemo and WALL-E, the last of which had a much longer development time, finally seeing the light of day in 2008. While longtime Pixar fans may feel divided on some apsects of WALL-E, the film received critical acclaim on release and has not only since been preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, but has also seen a re-release through the Criterion Collection, the first Pixar film to do so.
