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John Ratzenberger on WALL•E
By Fred Topel | Image property of Disney
WALL•E
Ratzenberger Returns for WALL•E
"I’ve got cousins," he joked. "You don’t really have to go too far to get into that headspace. It’s really scientifically though, NASA tells us that if you’re in space for that long you’re going to lose bone density. So basically you just become a big baby. I think they went more for that than any kind of a cautionary tale."
Ratzenberger does have humanitarian causes he supports, though he does not intend to get political. "I work with different people and I have a foundation, nutsandboltsfoundation.org. What we’ve done last year is set up summer camps for children to get back to working with their hands, to fabricate, work with wood and metal and tools because at the end of the day, our infrastructure is going to suffer. We have enough attorneys and brain surgeons, we don’t have to look far. But we’re literally running out of bricklayers, carpenters and welders and at the end of the day we’re going to suffer more for that than if we have one less attorney. So I started this foundation a couple of years ago and we’re in partnership with the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association International. And so we’ve got a lot of other people coming to us because people recognize, CEOs have been calling us about these camps because they know that in 6-10 years more than half their workforce is going to be retired. There’s nobody coming up because we’ve stopped teaching industrial arts in schools and that’s where kids used to learn how to do all that."
Back to Ratzenberger's longtime association with Pixar, he is all jokes, "I’ve got Polaroids from a Christmas party under lock and key. No, that’s the question to ask Andrew Stanton or John Lassiter. If they call me, I show up. It’s as simple as that because I know every single time there’s a Pixar movie, it’s part of history somehow. They’ve broken new ground. They could have rested on their laurels and their achievements a long time ago and just been a mediocre company that sends out mediocre product. They refused to do that. They try to outdo themselves every single project, and they do. They are their own competition. ‘We’ve done great, how can we do greater?’ What a lesson that would be. I don’t do that in my life."
His favorite Pixar character is P.T. Flea from A Bug's Life, but he has one idea for another animated character he could play. "The janitor of a small town school because that was my first hero as a kid. He was always whistling, always had something nice to say, and could fix stuff."
WALL•E opens to theaters on June
27th.
For the trailers, posters, stills, clips and more movie info, go the WALL•E
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Disney
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