Pixar Animation Studios / Disney Jerry Herman says he had no idea his "Hello, Dolly!" songs would figure so prominently in "WALL-E."

AP file photo Composer Jerry Herman, pictured here in 1996, says he likes how his songs were used to humanize the title character, WALL-E, in the animated feature film.

NEW YORK — Jerry Herman, eyes welling with tears, could hardly believe what he was hearing as he watched the new animated blockbuster "WALL-E."

The composer of the Tony-winning musical "Hello, Dolly!" had licensed songs from the 1964 show to Pixar — The Walt Disney Co.'s computer animation arm — but he had no idea his music and lyrics would factor so prominently in the story line of the sci-fi robot romance.

"I'm still blown away by the fact that two songs of mine that are close to 50 years old have been used as the underpinning" of the movie, Herman said in an interview from Los Angeles.

Writer-director Andrew Stanton used the tunes "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment" to express the psyche of the love-starved, trash-compacting robot WALL-E.

"My eyes were really wet at both the opening and the closing of the film, and just the wonderful way those songs were used to make him more human," said Herman, 76. "That's really what they did."

Laughing, Herman said it was "so weird" that the songs would be used in a robot movie, but he said the theme of "Hello, Dolly!" — a 19th-century widowed matchmaker who learns to live again — is relevant to the world of WALL-E, where chubby, unmotivated humans are pampered by robots in a giant spaceship before a wake-up call jolts them out of complacency.

"It's about a basic need for people to go on with life and not shut themselves away and to make the most out of the time we have on this planet," Herman said.

For a film with little human dialogue, "WALL-E" was the box-office champion in its opening weekend, nudging the Angelina Jolie thriller "Wanted" to second place.

"WALL-E" opens with panoramic views of galaxies far away, using "Sunday Clothes" as a sunny soundtrack. But the song's exuberant lyrics — "Out there/There's a world outside of Yonkers" — take on new meaning when the scene shifts to the bleak atmosphere of Wall-E's homeland: garbage-ridden planet Earth.

Stanton said he knew he wanted to juxtapose retro music with this futuristic setting, but discovered "a perfect fit" to his narrative when he stumbled upon the "Hello, Dolly!" repertoire and the lyric "out there."

WALL-E is the only 'bot of his kind left on Earth, an apocalyptic wasteland abandoned by humans 700 years before. His daily routine is compressing garbage into cubes to stash atop towering piles. At the end of the day, aching for connection, he retreats to his evening hide-out, where he uses an iPod to watch a video of the 1969 movie version of "Dolly," starring Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau.

WALL-E learns about love from the ballad "It Only Takes a Moment," in which Cornelius the clerk (Michael Crawford) tells his feelings to Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew). The number ends with the lovers holding hands and strolling through a park, and our hero clasps his robot fingers together to simulate hand-holding.

That scene resulted from an a-ha! moment Stanton had while watching Crawford and McAndrew's duet: "I saw them holding hands and it was like a light bulb going off. Like, that is exactly the best way I could express the phrase I love you' from a character that can't say it. And then I was hooked. Then I said, "Omigosh, this movie (Hello, Dolly!') is practically helping me tell my story."

By then, he knew he had to "bookend" his movie with the two songs. They play repeatedly, supplementing Thomas Newman's score and songs by Louis Armstrong ("La Vie En Rose") and Peter Gabriel ("Down to Earth").