In one corner, a diminutive, boxy robot trash collector with binoculars-like eyes rubs his twiggy arms as his love interest, a sleek white female machine, beeps with support. In the other, a Jedi with blue peepers and pharaohnic headgear readies her lightsaber, while her mentors Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi back her up.

Tomorrow, the battle begins, as two feature-length animations - Pixar's Wall.E and Lucasfilm Animation's Star Wars: The Clone Wars - go toe-to-toe against each other for box-office supremacy here in the one-week-long school holiday.

The dust has already settled in the United States. Wall.E, which premiered there in June, has already taken home more than US$216 million (S$306.6 million), becoming Pixar's sixth highest grossing film, just ahead of last year's Ratatouille.

George Lucas' latest offering, on the other hand, opened last week and has accumulated only about US$24 million. Wall.E earned more than double the amount in its opening weekend.

Mr Brett Hogg, managing director of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Wall.E's film distributor in Singapore, expects similar results here.

'We have to work a little harder to extend our promotional campaign longer since the movie opened much earlier in the States but we feel very positive about it. It's a Pixar film after all.'

Picture perfect

It was a day after Wall.E's screening for the media in June and the press conference at Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles was buzzing with journalists.

You would be forgiven if you thought an A-list star such as Tom Cruise was going to appear. Instead, the biggest name on the programme belonged to comedian Jeff Garlin, 46, best known for his work in HBO's offbeat series Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Actually, scratch that. The biggest name is Pixar, as Garlin would have you know.

Wryly, he recalled his reaction after director Andrew Stanton invited him to a presentation to cast him as the voice of an oversized spaceship captain in the 97-minute animated film. 'The guy who wrote and directed Finding Nemo is doing a movie at Pixar and wants me to star in his new movie. Sure, let's see what the presentation's all about. Of course I'm thrilled.'

He attributed the success of the animation studio, set up in 1986 which became part of Disney's consortium of companies 20 years later, to its focus on telling a great tale.

'Pixar works on its stories harder than any place I've been around,' said the veteran with 26 years of experience in the industry. 'So many movies, you go on and it changes the pages constantly while you are filming. Pixar will not move forward unless it got the story right. I see almost an instance of utopia.'

He added: 'Other studios, laziness runs amok. Dollar signs run amok. Not that Pixar does not want to make tons of money, everyone does. But it is concerned about making a great movie, and the money will just follow.'

Garlin was spot on about the money part. All nine theatrical releases of Pixar since its first work, Toy Story in 1994, has made at least US$360 million each. Finding Nemo is its greatest success story, grossing US$864 million and is No.16 on the all-time money-making charts.

Naturally, Stanton hoped to repeat the success with Wall.E.

After all, the idea of the film was gestated at the same brainstorming meal that dreamt up Finding Nemo and A Bug's Life (1998). This legendary session with Pixar's earliest creative minds - John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Joe Ranft (who died in a 2005 car crash) - has been dubbed The Lunch.

Stanton recalled: 'One of the half-brained sentences during The Lunch was, 'hey, we can do a sci-fi movie about the last robot of Earth. Everyone has left and this machine doesn't know it can stop, and it has been doing this forever.'

'It was just the loneliest scenario I've ever heard and I loved it. That is perhaps why it stayed in the ether for so long.'

The robot was later named Wall.E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-class. He goes about his job, cleaning up a lifeless Earth until one day, another robot, Eve, arrives.

Other than pronouncing their own names, they communicate via a series of beeps and mechanical crunching designed by famed sound engineer Ben Burtt. But even without words, the sentient beings fall in love and embark on an adventure to reunite when Eve is separated from Wall.E.

War games

Lucas, on the other hand, is banking on the Star Wars name to win fans over to the latest addition to the franchise.

'We are not afraid of Wall.E,' he declared at Lucasfilm Animation facility in California last month, when Life! told him Star Wars: The Clone Wars is opening on the same day as the Pixar film.

The 64-year-old laughed and then became more serious. 'We are not a giant movie. We are the underdogs but we are Star Wars. We are not in this because we want to make a lot of money. We are in this because we have a lot of fun. We are not competing in the same arena as they are.'

Indeed, while Wall.E was produced in about four years, the latest Star Wars feature-length film was completed in 21/2 years. Wall.E had a US$180-million budget; The Clone Wars was conceived as a pilot of a 22-episode animated series first, each episode estimated to cost US$1 million.

Lucas said: 'We did everything we could to take television to a whole new different level. We took it to such a level that it is a feature. It is the low end of Pixar.'

To pit Wall.E against The Clone Wars is a battle akin to Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. Pixar, after all, was part of Lucasfilm as its computer division before it was bought over by Apple's Steve Jobs in 1986.

In fact, Lucas described Pixar as his 'godchildren'. 'We show each other movies all the time. They are obviously very impressive.'

He gave the Pixar folks a sneak peek of The Clone Wars. 'They said, 'Oh my god, how did you do that?' It seemed impossible to them. And I'd say, 'Come over, I'll teach you.''

Teach is also what Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader before turning to the dark side, has to do in The Clone Wars. In the 98-minute film, he is mentor to spunky 14-year-old Ahsoka Tano, who is not shy about defying his instructions.

Together, they battle the villainous Count Dooku and his lackeys to thwart his evil plans and, along the way, learn lessons of trust and responsibilities.

If the theme sounds kiddy compared to the epic six-film Star Wars saga, it is.

Director Dave Filoni admitted that the political themes of the original live action films are toned down for the targeted younger audiences. 'The fans will still love it, but at the same time, we are trying to introduce Star Wars to a new group of fans.'

Star Wars fan Timothy Lucas Tan, 37, is not convinced. A member of the Singaporean faction of 501st Legion, a worldwide community of fans, he said: 'It's targeted at kids so that they would buy the toys later.'

For any animated film, merchandising is a huge market. Pixar's Cars (2006) alone generated US$2 billion in global retail sales with items such as toys even though the film made just about a quarter of that in the box office. Paraphernalia sales will be what both Wall.E and The Clone Wars' investors root for after the films go off the theatres.

But will Mr Tan still catch The Clone Wars? Absolutely, he said. 'I need to see what happens. I'll just watch and enjoy it.'

stlife@sph.com.sg

'It was just the loneliest scenario I've ever heard and I loved it'

Director Andrew Stanton on the idea of Wall.E