A single scene with the welding robot BURN·E in WALL·E grew into a short film after Angus MacLane pitched the idea to Andrew Stanton. All images © Disney/Pixar.

Remember BURN•E? The welding robot from WALL•E, who got locked out of the Axiom? Well, he's back in his own eponymous short, helmed by Angus MacLane, who was the directing animator on the feature written and directed by Andrew Stanton. We got the chance to find out from MacLane how this hapless character got his own chance to shine on the WALL•E DVD and Blu-ray. MacLane, who earned an Annie for Outstanding Achievement in Character Animation on The Incredibles, has also worked on A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monster's, Inc., Finding Nemo, Geri's Game, For the Birds and One Man Band.

Bill Desowitz: Let's begin with how this came about.

Angus MacLane: What happened was we were in the middle of production. I had animated the scene with BURN•E that you see in the movie. And I had been pestering Andrew about what had happened to this guy and pitching him like, "Oh, we have to cut back to him here; we have to cut back to him there! Maybe he should be on the side of the ship when they're re-entering the atmosphere." Andrew thought those ideas were funny, but said we can't put him back in the movie because it's going to slow the pace down, especially at that point when you're wrapping everything up. So he encouraged me to find a way to make all these gags work in one central story as a potential DVD short film. And I was really excited about that opportunity, and in off hours and lunches I boarded up this idea and pitched him in the hallways in between meetings.

BD: And what was the central theme you came up with?

AM: If WALL•E has a positive effect on all the robots and humans that he meets on the Axiom, what if there was someone that he didn't have a positive effect on? And in doing that, he inadvertently gets locked out of the Axiom in the movie. So that was my touchstone. WALL•E always made his life hell and didn't mean to, but it just worked out that way. It was kind of like bad day at work. Now the idea of him fixing the light pole was something that I added and we subsequently changed the shot before the movie was released. I liked there serene moment of WALL•E touching Saturn's rings and that could cause this chain reaction and that would be a nice inadvertent thing to destroy this light. And his job would be to fix this light 'cause he used to weld this little box. Once I came up with that, then it was a matter of figuring out what other points in the movie we could conceivably cut back to. That was the concept of the driving force behind BURN•E.

MacLane had intimate knowledge of the WALL·E universe from working on the film as the directing animator. He knew what assets could be reused, plus what to build, as with the new character SUPPLY•R.

BD: So what was it like making this short?

AM: It was a tremendous opportunity for me and was only possible because Andrew felt safe with me after working on WALL•E for three-and-a-half years. I started in story. The film is seven-and-a-half minutes long and we reuse some stuff, but there's an economy to it that you get from knowing that universe and that world. So it was easy to riff on that, knowing what the [assets] were like and what we had to build. There were some built for the film: the new character of his boss, SUPPLY•R, and all those hallways had to either be rebuilt or repurposed to look like it was more of the same, even though a lot of that production design is intended to look a little darker and a little danker than, say, the Axiom itself. You're doing more dirty, used-tech, which is a lot easier to do and is, I think, a lot more fun because you can do more shadows and more lighting.

I'd done a sequence in the movie a long, long time ago, which was the subterranean lair, and there were a bunch of jokes from that that I tried to put back. When it came time to choose a story team -- I had done a lot of the initial boards but needed someone to help out -- I got Derek Thompson, who did story with me on WALL•E and had also boarded the hallway sequence that was cut after I'd done it. So we were both excited about exploring some of the visual ideas in BURN•E that we were not able to do in the feature.