By Glenn Whipp > Film Writer

"Not another robot movie."

You can't blame Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt from thinking that as he drove over to Pixar's Emeryville, Calif., campus four years ago to meet with "WallE" director Andrew Stanton. After bringing the aliens and tin men, not to mention everything else in the "Star Wars" universe, to life over the course of six movies, Burtt was ready to leave robots behind. (RELATED: Robot Romance; Hello, Broadway show tunes!)

"You get to the point where you feel you're going stale," Burtt says.

"I wasn't sure I had a new robot idea inside me."

But Stanton's pitch sold Burtt, and "WallE" just might be the legendary sound man's best work to date. It's certainly his most extensive. Burtt created more than 2,500 sounds for the movie. By way of comparison, Burtt made between 800 to 1,000 sounds for "Star Wars" films and 700 for an "Indiana Jones" movie.

Like he did for that lovable little droid R2D2, Burtt gives WallE sounds that convey soulful emotions without sacrificing the character's inherent mechanical nature.

"It had to go deeper than we did with R2 because WallE carries the weight of the whole movie," Burtt says. "We needed to give him a large range of reactions - he's curious, surprised, desperate - but none of the sounds he makes are words, at least, not as we understand them."

Working with Burtt was a dream for sci-fi geek Stanton. For one thing, Stanton's repeated viewings of "Star Wars" led to a shorthand that wouldn't be possible with other sound designers.

"Once, I was trying to describe a sound and couldn't get it across, and he was just staring at me," Stanton remembers. "Finally I said, `You know that one robot in `Star Wars' that looks like a trash can?' `Yeah, the go-gonk.' I felt, I shouldn't go there, speaking `Star Wars'-ese. But Ben Burtt made me want to go into movies."

Burtt - who created the whoosh of the light-saber, Darth Vader's asthmatic breathing, E.T.'s "phone home" and Chewbacca's howl - is used to that kind of reaction. He grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., listening to movies as much as watching them, recording films and then listening to the sounds on headphones.

"It's flattering to get the chance to work on films that are associated with a certain sound signature," Burtt says. "Though at the time, you're just doing your job. You're thinking, `I gotta get something by the end of the day or I'm in trouble.' "