Last week 30,000 people attended the 2007 San Diego Comic Convention. I was there in my home town on Friday and a little bit on Saturday, and it was pretty overwhelming. I've been going since 1993, and it has at least tripled in size since then. I barely had an opportunity to visit all my favorite vendors, and I only made it to one panel: the WALL-E panel, of course!
There, 7,000 lucky guests were treated to glimpses of preproduction art, animation tests and a synopsis of the film by director Andrew Stanton. They also got to see a sound demo by Star Wars veteran Ben Burtt, and about 7 minutes of footage from the film! Here are some reviews of the event:Audio Interview with Andrew:
http://www.comingsoon.net/audio/stantonwalle.mp3
"I think that dog is happy to see me" / "I don't care what the math says, it's not doing what it's supposed to" / "I've been watching a lot of BSG"
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=22911
"It certainly looks like another imaginative, fun film from Disney and Pixar. It also looks like Ben Burtt's going to win another Academy Award for sound design."
http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/07/28/comic-con-indepth-wall-e-details-revealed/
"The footage that was shown was unlike anything that has been ever done by Disney before. I’d call it an anti-Disney movie."
http://www.cinematical.com/2007/07/29/comic-con-prince-caspian-and-wall-e-the-disney-pixar-pre/
"If you're reading a story about Comic-Con on a film site I probably don't need to tell you how much Ben Burtt rocks and how much of a contribution he makes to any film he works on."
"In short, the clip was great and I can't wait for the film."
http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/07/comic-con-toon-.html
"Going in to Comic-Con, we published a list of the 10 most anticipated movies being presented in San Diego. Coming out of the convention, the two films I can't wait to see in their entirety were nowhere to be found on our original list (that's the beauty of Comic-Con, really).
First, there's Pixar's next toon, "Wall-E," from "Finding Nemo" director Andrew Stanton."
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2574379
Same thing here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33497
"we got an awesome 10 minute clip from the beginning of the movie. Andrew Stanton stressed that it was unfinished. Still, it looks loving amazing"
http://www.reelzchannel.com/outtakes/blog.aspx?blogentryid=409
"Where as Fox's Robots took the standard approach to robot animated characters we've seen a million times before, Pixar's creativity shines through in a very original way."
And here are my photos from the 'Con.
