HE is rusty, lipless, sub-literate and keeps company with garbage. Worse, he’s a “Hello, Dolly!” fan. This little robot, who goes by the name Wall-E  for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class  is also the newest face (not that he has one) of Pixar.

Last year’s offering, “Ratatouille,” about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with “Wall-E,” a $180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin.

Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn’t care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not when the movie comes out on Friday. “I never think about the audience,” he said. “If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.”

Mr. Stanton, 42, sat in a Toronto hotel room this month, shaggy-haired and bearded, bouncing in his chair with a tween’s frenzied energy. In this way he seemed to embody the anti-corporate posture that is part of the Pixar mythology. When John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative executive, announced the company’s $7.4 billion acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he did so in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Employees at the Pixar “campus” in Emeryville, Calif., ride scooters and play foosball. “It’s like a film school with no teachers,” Mr. Stanton said. “Everyone actually wants you to take risks.”