Building a robot is a feat of engineering and science.
Building one who captures the hearts of audiences and sells the central relationship of a film?
Now that’s movie magic.
Credit: Gareth Gatrell/NETFLIX
“And he’s not a robot, but I loved E.T.
I love his eyes.
I love how childlike E.T.
Elias David Talbert/courtesy David E. Talbert
That’s what Buddy 3000 is.”
Only 4 at the time Talbert was gearing up for production, Elias made an indelible impact on Buddy.
“I asked him, ‘What do you think he should look like,?’
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And he started drawing this stuff,” Talbert recounts.
“When he sees it he’s like, ‘I did that.
I drew Buddy.'”
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“I had the words Elias 260 put around both of his eyes,” Talbert explains.
“Elias is my son’s name.
And 260 is the address of my great grandmother.
It’s a full circle moment.
The most magical in my life was my great grandmother.
She treated me like there was always pixie dust floating on me.
The most magical now in my life is my son Elias.
This robot is about me coming full circle with my childhood now to my son’s childhood.”
But that still left a lot of questions.
There were a lot of questions up front."
At first, Guaglione and his team experimented with the notion that Buddy was a toddler.
But Talbert felt the earliest renderings veered too young and clumsy.
“In some ways, it’s more like a kid that mimics you.
Like when you’re really little and you play and you kind of imitate each other.”
Still, how do you make a hunk of metal cute?
“In animation, we often talk about the word appeal,” adds Guaglione.
As an adult, we look at that and find our inner child.
It warms us up to him instantly.
Buddy’s design is also heavily steeped in the film’s Victorian steampunk aesthetic.
He looks weighty and is made of heavy-duty metal with rivets.
When we moves around, he’s quite sturdy," says Guaglione.
“We had to confirm that we couldn’t deviate too much from what was on set.
That being said, a prop-maker doesn’t necessarily think [about] how does he sit down?
Or how does he move his legs?
Or can he scratch the top of his head?
It never occurs to anybody to think of that.
It was Guaglione who devised the solution, after getting his watch repaired.
“‘There were these amazing gears that were in there.
They were all moving independently and seemingly simultaneously.’
He said, ‘What if we mimicked the look of the inside of a watch?'”
“There was a lot of discussion about how does it wind up?
How fast does it go?”
Would it change color depending on his mood like a mood ring?
They tried a lot of different things, but in the end, simplicity was key.
It was just trying to have something that felt lovable and warm.”
Particularly because he doesn’t have a mouth.
“We showed a little animation of a mouth moving and he was afraid,” Talbert recounts.
“He got scared.”
They leaned heavily into crafting performance detail through Buddy’s eyes and small movements in his body.
We as humans are accustomed to seeing these little micro-expressions we make.
We couldn’t necessarily distort or bend the metal," explains Guaglione.
That still left the question of what he should sound like.
“We had all these voice actors coming in to voice Buddy,” notes Talbert.
“[We had to figure out] what does he sound like?
Does he sound like gibberish?
Like RD-D2 and someone has to decode it?
Or is he slow and deliberate like Wall-E and E.T.?”
The answer, as these things so often do, came in a bit of serendipity.
That’s not playing around.
That is IT.’
And he became the voice of Buddy."
All of these factors came together to create the one-of-a-kind Buddy 3000.
Talbert reveals there are plans to make toy versions of Buddy, alongside potential stage adaptations and screen spin-offs.
One that could melt even the coldest of metal hearts.
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