They still obey their programmed directives, but they also choose many of their actions. There does seem to be a spectrum of human-ness in the robots shown in Wall-E. When Wall-E follows Eve to the ship he introduces himself to a couple humans who talk to him as though to another person without condescension and only mild surprise, but those humans still order around and even kill other robots without any concerns. The human-ness of these robots seems to be unintentional and the implications of having sentient servants are largely ignored. She takes off flying around the area in a way that’s very playful and clearly only for her enjoyment, not as part of her programmed mission. Once the shuttle leaves, though, it becomes obvious that she was hiding her individuality. When we first see Eve a shuttle is dropping her off on Earth and she begins arbitrarily scanning the world around her for plant life.
Eve is an EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) probe sent out by the human’s ship to check Earth for plant life, which would let them know it’s safe to return. Wall-E developed essentially alone on Earth, but Eve seems to have gained consciousness or her personality while performing her job that involved ongoing robot and human contact. His return is indicated by his quirks resurfacing: how he won’t let go of Eve’s hand and the angled way he holds his eyes.
Of course, the film doesn’t actually kill off the main character a spark from a departing “kiss” from Eve brings him back. We understand that he’s no longer Wall-E, who was defined by his individuality. He doesn’t communicate with Eve he crushes the things she shows him from his collection as trash he completely unconsciously goes about his programmed activity of trash disposal. When Wall-E restarts, he acts completely robotic. During the course of the film he gets badly injured and Eve, his robot love interest, brings him back to Earth to repair from broken-down WALL-E parts. He even has a pet: a friendly cockroach, the only biological living thing we see on Earth for most of the movie.įor Wall-E, robotic behavior signals his death. Wall-E loves the musical Hello, Dolly! He records songs to play during his travels and collects a garbage can lid as a hat to dance along when watching it at night. He collects things, like Rubik’s cubes, light bulbs, and rubber ducks, which he stores in his house inside a larger, inert WALL-E robot. Wall-E continues to perform his programmed action – collecting, compressing, and stacking garbage – but he’s developed a personality and hobbies. In the opening scenes we see that at one point there were many, probably thousands, of “WALL-E” (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth-class) robots roaming the Earth and creating neat stacks of the omnipresent garbage, but our Wall-E is the only one left. Wall-E, the titular and central character, is a waste disposal robot who’s been left on Earth to clean up after humans have fled for the temporary safety of a luxury space liner. They act like robots.īy contrast, several of the robots have personalities and do things because they want to, not because they’re programmed to. They may be biological humans, but their bodies are atrophied and they don’t use their minds for anything highly individual. Children are educated by robots and the content is essentially a commercial.
They don’t care about Earth and don’t really seem to know much about it. They receive all their nutrition from drink brought to them by robot attendants, they change the color of their clothes immediately when informed a new one is in style, and they exist almost entirely in the digital world. The humans in Wall-E are shown to be mindless consumers. Wall-E initially interested me in the context of this project because its heroes are robots that are robotic only in very particular aspects of their lives, and the humans are often robotic. Over the next week I’ll be posting my thoughts on the different events in Ambiguously Human, starting the with films and then the installation.
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