Shelby Forthright is the posthumous overarching antagonist of the 2008 Disney/Pixar animated feature film WALL-E. He was played by the late Fred Willard.
Background[]
Personality[]
Shelby is seen as active and outgoing, thinking that his two Operations (Clean-Up and Recolonize) will be a success. However, later in the movie, his personality is shown to have changed into a state of nervousness as his efforts to save Earth have seemingly failed.
Appearances[]
WALL-E[]
Shelby Forthright was the CEO of the megacorporation Buy n Large in the early 22nd century. He pushed his company to make Earth more comfortable and pleasant and the company gained global leadership. However, with its advancements in technology, the corporation caused garbage problems on the planet to amass due to consumerism facilitating the corporation.
In 2105, Shelby came up with a plan to evacuate Earth, as it was too choked with trash. He proposed Operation Clean-Up, in which trash compacting robots called WALL-Es would clean up Earth by cubing trash which they stratify into towers. Mobile incinerators would reduce the towers to a combustion stream while toxic emissions from the incinerators would be removed from the atmosphere. Humanity would stay in space aboard starships for five years. He also proposed Operation Recolonize where after Earth is cleaned up, humanity would return to repopulate.
However, five years later, the system to clean the atmosphere was not properly completed and the WALL-Es and the incinerators eventually ceased functioning. Shelby was convinced that Operation Clean-Up had failed. He estimated that without the system to clean the atmosphere, the toxicity caused Earth to be unable to support life again. He decided to cancel Operation Recolonize and let mankind remain in space forever, believing that it would be easier to do than trying to fix the problem. He secretly sent Directive A-113 to the starships' AUTO units, instructing the AUTOs to take control of everything on their starships and not return to Earth unless life was proven sustainable. The judgment on whether or not Earth was viable for living again would be based on signs of plant life. The AUTOs took the directive literally. Because of this, humanity remained in space for centuries.
Nearly 700 years after Directive A-113 was sent out to the starliners, a single sprout was discovered by the last functioning WALL-E and brought onboard the flagship of the starliners, the Axiom as evidence that plant life was growing among the ruins of cities.
Trivia[]
- He is the first (and so far, only) live-action character to appear in any Pixar production. Director Andrew Stanton shot Fred Willard's scenes personally and described Shelby as "[a] lovable car salesman".
- His name is a play on the phrase "shall be forthright".
- Him standing at a mic podium in a front of a blue curtain with the Buy "N' Large logo on it is a parody of how the United States President does news conferences.
- In fact, in a deleted scene, AUTO sees some Shelby Forthright messages, where they show up as a descriptive step where the dates they show us are 2050, 2060 and 2070 meaning that the evacuation occurred in 2050 or 2049. Although it could be that those were the initial dates of where they evacuated only in what year the movie, that could be shown at the beginning of the year 2080 would be shown; perhaps the initial dates of the post-production phase of the movie.
- Shelby has a resemblance to former US president Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, four years before the release of WALL-E.
