Not exactly playing with food

COSTA MESA — Roger Mouri got one relief early Saturday morning at the first Orange County Canstruction competition. When his team was done building an intricate structure out of food cans, it got to scatter cans all over the floor.

That’s because Mouri’s display was based on “Wall-E,” the recent Pixar smash about a trash-compacting robot who does his best to clean up Earth after the world’s population has fled the planet in a spaceship.

Mouri and the other volunteers from Disneyland recreated Wall-E and his robot love interest, Eve, out of hundreds of food cans — including a pair of Ortega chile cans for Eve’s beady blue eyes — and then, to finish the scene, they dumped their remaining supply in piles around Wall-E’s outstretched claw. Just like in the movie.

“We actually had to practice several times,” said Mouri, the director of architecture and facility engineering for Disneyland. “Of course, the challenges were putting together the head and the arms.”

The Disneyland design team was one of a dozen participating in the Canstruction event at South Coast Plaza, in which builders brought together more than 50,000 cans of food to arrange into sculptures of the Hoover Dam, SpongeBob SquarePants and other well-known images. The displays will remain up through Sept. 21 before all the cans are donated to the Orange County Food Bank.

Louie Garcia, the chairman of the Orange County Canstruction contest, said the total donated cans amounted to more than 686,000 pounds of food. During a slow economic time, he said, that was a valuable donation to the food bank.

“They’re in need of food right now, especially at a time when people aren’t giving as much,” Garcia said.

Canstruction, sponsored by the Society for Design Administration, sponsors competitions throughout North America, but hadn’t ventured to Orange County until this weekend. The displays at South Coast Plaza will be judged by a jury during the coming days, with an award ceremony to be held Sept. 14.