AUDIO PUPPETEER: We wanted to have this illusion that the voices for Wall-E and Eve and the other characters are part of their function,
(sound designer Ben Burtt says of Pixar's Wall-E.)
Burtt speaks the characters' language. In fact, he's created a galaxy of unusual noises in his 30-year career: the crack of Indy's whip, Chewbacca's yowl, the lightsaber hum.
IT'S A RISKY MOVE by anyone's standards. Pixar's delightfully adventurous robot-in-love story Wall-E boldly unspools without any human dialogue for the first hour or so. This trick seems akin to having R2-D2 carry half of a Star Wars film, speaking only in his emotive whistles, beeps and boops. In fact, Wall-E's “voice" comes from the same source as R2's idiosyncratic technobabble: Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt.
In a renowned three-decade career with Lucasfilm, Burtt, 59, created everything from Darth Vader's heavy breathing and Chewbacca's yowl to the hum of lightsabers (the latter famously conjured from the sounds made by an idling movie projector and some chance microphone feedback). The native of Syracuse, N.Y., also came up with the signature crack of Indiana Jones' whip in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
