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alt title(s): Wall E 
Pixar's 9th film is a Science Fiction love story.
Around 800 years into the future, humans have abandoned the now inhospitable Earth to be cleaned up by robots while they enjoy a vacation in space. It doesn't really work, and the last of those robots, WALL•E, is collecting junk and living with his pet cockroach. One day, WALL•E is going about his business as usual when a spaceship carrying another, much more modern robot arrives to drop her off. Her name is EVE, and WALL•E is smitten. When the ship comes back and picks her up, he stows away. We won't spoil the rest.
Oh, and it's got awesome CGI.
For information about the DVD short, BURN-E, check the Pixar Shorts page.
This movie has a Crowning Moment of Awesome vote-off.
This film includes examples of:
- Accidental Aesop — The movie is often interpreted as having an environmentalist or anti-consumerism message, but the director stated that there was not supposed to be any political message and that the setting was only made to justify the story.
- Acceptable Targets — The Mega Corp monopoly Buy 'n' Large.
- And, of course, the irony in Pixar being part of one.
- Acme Products — BnL makes everything humanity uses (and makes it to last, apparently).
- Action Girlfriend — EVE
- After the End
- All Animals Are Dogs: A cockroach is made
cute adorable. WALL•E even commands it to sit in one scene. It doesn't work. Though he does it a second time and it DOES work. For the rest of the film.
- All There In The Manual — A significant amount of the backstory is provided by the Onion-esque Buy 'N' Large website.
- It should be pointed out that the Buy 'N' Large website is offline and now redirects straight to the WALL•E site. You can access a small portion of it via internet archives, but not very much.
- A little more information is covered on the DVD. For example, Buy N Large started out selling frozen yogurts. It's true!
- The BUY part sold frozen yogurts. The LARGE part sold Tall and Large clothing. They combined forces after realizing eating one made you need to buy the other.
- Operation Recolonize had a manual to tell the captain to put the plant in the holodetector. "It's that easy!" yeah, how big was the book again?
- Possibly the other 900-odd pages contained instructions on how to farm, build houses, and all the other stuff people are shown doing in the credits.
- Animation Age Ghetto: Despite being a serious contender for best film in 2008, animated or otherwise, the Oscars are still rigged so that a "cartoon" won't even be considered for a Best Picture Oscar anymore. Fortunately, some other awards and critics circles are more accommodating. The Golden Globes, for example, nominated the film for Best Picture. The LA Film Critics Association and several other prominent regional groups also awarded the film Best Picture.
- Anti Mutiny — AUTO does just this.
- Apocalypse How — Class 1
- Apocalyptic Log — Override Directive A113.
- Archive Binge — The Captain does this after asking the computer system to define "Earth": he spends presumably hours inquiring about various aspects of Earth and past human culture.
- Arm Cannon — EVE.
- Artificial Gravity — The method by which bone loss occurred, resulting in chubby infantile human beings.
- Art Shift — The humans of the past, such as the BnL CEO, are live-action. The humans of the future are computer-generated. Word Of God is that redoing all the "Hello Dolly" scenes in CGI would've been too much trouble, so they just went with this route. This is later lampshaded in the scene of the portraits of the various Axiom captains, which shows the captains shifting from photorealistic to cartoonish over time.
- The credits also use this trope, showing a series of vignettes in progressively more recent artistic styles, going from cave-paintings and hieroglyphics to straight-up imitations of Seurat and Van Gogh. This is to show how humans relearned the skills they had lost on the Axiom, such as artistry. And then? It goes to not-quite 8-bit sprites.
- Astronomic Zoom: Out there, there's a world outside of Yonkers...
- Award Snub — Didn't win a single award for which it was nominated for the 2008 Annie Awards. In fact, the Annies were swept almost completely by Kung Fu Panda. Not that Kung Fu Panda isn't a decent movie, but did the voters even watch WALL•E? And that's not even touching the Oscars...
- A World Half Full
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished — Brutal aversion. WALL•E gets continually more and more beaten up over the course of their adventure; any damage he takes, even little scrapes and bumps, stays. Back on Earth, he had extra bits lying around to fix himself up. EVE doesn't take nearly as much damage, though her design is also built to take significantly more punishment.
- Beta Couple — John and Mary
- The Big Board — Sigourney Weaver
- Big Fat Future - ALL of the passengers of the Axiom are obese.
- Big No - AUTO. Well, more like a Flat No.
- EVE gets one of these too, when WALL•E gets a shock to the circuits from AUTO.
- And again later when WALL•E gets crushed beneath the Holo-Detector.
- Also when WALL•E accidentally fires her Arm Cannon in the repair ward.
- Blithe Spirit — WALL•E, albeit inadvertently, towards all the other robots and humanity itself.
- Brand X — Buy 'n' Large destroyed the future Earth with rampant consumerism and incompetence.
- Butt Monkey — M-O, unintentionally caused by WALL•E.
- Character Development — EVE at first is a paranoid, mostly work-obsessed drone until she starts interacting with WALL•E, when she starts to show off her human traits. As these emotions show, her voice changes to reflect it, going from robotic and distant to feminine and emotional.
- Also, upon planetfall she is somewhat trigger-happy, blasting anything with her Arm Cannon if it offers the slightest sign of threat to herself. By the end of the movie she uses it only to help or defend others.
- Chekhovs Gun — The plant, the tape, the parts replacement/cannibalization, the lighter, heck, even the lawn gnomes, somewhat. Andrew Stanton even talks about the concept of this trope, without naming it, during the DVD Commentary.
- Chekhovs Gunman — Not only are Shelby Forthright and AUTO both shown in the ad for the Axiom cruise, but so are most of the bots WALL•E winds up meeting in the repair ward.
- Chekhovs Skill — WALL•E using a fire extinguisher to jet-propel himself.
- Also, WALL•E swapping his worn-out treads with newer ones, showing he doesn't have a problem scavenging for parts to repair himself with. First referenced when he was knocked into the wall by EVE, which transfers the skill to her, so she can bring it up later on her own.
- Not to mention the electric power of EVE's kiss is demonstrated in the space dancing sequence.
- The Collector Of The Strange: WALL•E keeps a wide assortment of random trinkets that catch his fancy. The items he collects don't seem to have any particular theme.
- They all tend toward the "interesting," though. Things he wouldn't interact with every day – things that aren't usually considered trash. Rubik's cubes, shoes, cutlery, other things like that.
- Although, in this instance, "Interesting" is a definition we never see, as it's entirely without pattern within WALL-E's head (See when he finds the diamond ring, and finds the ringbox more interesting).
- Color Coded For Your Convenience — Heroine EVE and Battle Butler GO-4 both have tractor beams of sorts; EVE's is blue and GO-4's is red.
- Also humans who switch their clothing from blue back to red are the ones who have been "awakened." See Shout Out.
- Computer Voice — The filmmakers deliberately sought out Sigourney Weaver to voice the Axiom's computer as a Shout Out to Alien
- Convection Schmonvection — Well, technically 'no radiant heat' – WALL•E has no problem on the outside of a ship while it's buzzing the sun. In fact, he just takes the opportunity to charge his solar-cells pretty much instantly. He apparently was able to endure very high temperatures as evidenced by when EVE's ship lands on top of him. Of course, he also couldn't be all that close to the sun or he would have lost his grip the second he came into the gravitational pull of the sun.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive — The BNL CEO, especially once it's revealed that he ordered all the autopilots to never return to Earth, and to never tell anyone about said order.
- Forthright didn't even have to make a secret conspiracy of it, but he did anyway, to keep the Muggles placated.
- Creek Moment (EARTH!)
- Creepy Monotone — AUTO. While M-O also has a monotone voice to announce the presence of "Foreign Contaminants", he primarily communicates with cute beeps and hums, as do the other nice robots.
- Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming — Lots - see under Disney And Pixar.
- Crowning Music Of Awesome — "Define Dancing".
- Cue The Sun — Literally aboard the Axiom
- Cyber Cyclops — Yet another thing that makes AUTO an Expy for the HAL 9000...
- Desolation Shot — The first five minutes of the film.
- Did Not Do The Research — The environmental Aesop, while effective, is completely and utterly impossible. Stuff doesn't last that long, trash compactors are completely different than trash disposal devices (WALL•E should have been an incinerator or a composter). The Fridge Logic would really killed this movie if it weren't so darn cute.
- Except that the filmmakers aren't exactly trying to create a completely realistic future. When writing satire, minor breaks from logic are acceptable.
- Disney Death — Clever variation — WALL•E is almost crushed to bits in the climax, but EVE knows how to fix him; the real tension is that once she has, he doesn't remember anything about the 700 years of his life, including her. His acquired sentience appears lost. *sniff* He then gets it back a few minutes later... only after she "kisses" him, of course
- Disney Villain Death — GO-4 gets kicked out a window and smashes on to the deck.
- Dogged Nice Guy — The title character... gets a bit creepy if you think about it too much.
- EVE never really tried to discourage him, though; at least once she knew who he was.
- Dojikko — WALL•E becomes one when EVE arrives and he is too busy watching her to look where he's going.
- Draco In Leather Pants — AUTO. Considering the things he does and his overall demeanor, he's the only viable Mary Sue target. This ranges from the mundane (average fangirl Sue hanger-on) to the uber-sparkly (a God Mode Villain Stu whose only purpose seems to be making AUTO into his weepy uke slave).
- The Dragon — GO-4.
- Dude Shes Like In A Coma — Sorta. Like other examples, it's only creepy if you overthink it.
- Dying Like Animals — The people of Earth blissfully allowed their own destruction.
- Ear Worm — The Buy 'n' Large jingle. Do not click on this link if you value your sanity.
- Also, "Put On Your Sunday Clothes". Goddamn.
- Earth That Was — The premise of the film, as humanity departed Earth 700 years before the film began. Emphasized by the Captain suddenly spending hours and hours bringing up articles about the earth of the past and later relating his glee over planting pizza.
- Emotional Torque — The whole damn film.
- Ensemble Darkhorse — M-O
- Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory — Judging from the WMG, you could find quite a few biblical allegories in this film. WALL•E has been interpreted as everything from Adam to Jesus to Satan, and EVE has been compared to Noah's dove as well as the obvious biblical Eve.
- Fake Out Opening — For the first 30 seconds or so, it appears to be a typically optimistic Disney flick. Then you see Earth. The music is so loud and surprising it serves as a Scare Chord.
- Family Unfriendly Death — GO-4
- Food Pills — It's actually more like Food Smoothies than pills. "Try Cupcake in a Cup!"
- The Fool — All WALL•E wants to do is hold hands with a girl-bot and groove to the old-time "Hello Dolly." Without being the slightest bit aware of it, every human (and most robots) he meets (even if it's just a Crash Into Hello) gets knocked out of their hum-drum daily existence maintaining the status quo and learns how to not just "survive, but to live", and he gets really, really lucky regarding survival.
- Fictional Counterpart — Buy n Large/Wal-Mart, though on a much more massive scale.
- Friend To All (Remaining) Living Things — WALL•E. That cockroach didn't have to follow him.
- Gattaca Babies — No one seems to have kids on their own in the future, so Fridge Logic dictates this trope must be at work.
- Gaussian Girl — Played straight with EVE, and her sleek shiny design seems to exist to make this happen as much as possible.
- Genre Busting — IMDB has this movie listed as an Animation-Adventure-Comedy-Drama-Family-Romance-Sci-Fi.
- Heroic Sociopath — The crazy massage robot, HAN-S. Try to say you don't see it.
- Holding Hands — How WALL•E and EVE express their love for one another.
- Indestructible Edible — WALL•E's pet cockroach can still eat a 700-year-old Twinkie.
- That's more of an homage of the traditional post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland: Nothing left but the cockroaches and twinkies.
- Inspector Javert — M-O, who relentlessly hunts the one who would tarnish his germ-free domain. Then makes friends with him.
- Last Of His Kind — WALL•E has outlasted every one of the other robots in his series; Word Of God says it was because someone forgot to turn him off.
- Leave The Two Lovebirds Alone — M-O shooing away the other robots from WALL•E and EVE having a moment at the end of the movie.
- Lights Off Their Eyes
- Load Bearing Hero — WALL•E is crushed holding up the holodetector, though EVE is able to repair him.
- Love At First Sight — WALL•E for EVE. The pickings have been pretty slim for him.
- For a mostly non-anthropomorphic robot, she is beautiful.
- John and Mary too, though substitute 'love at first physical contact with a human being in their entire lives.'
- Lucky Charms Title — WALL•E
- Mac Guffin Escort Mission — EVE's mission is to safely bring plant life from Earth to the Axiom's scanner, while fighting off the opposition from AUTO.
- Made Of Iron — The cockroach survives being stomped flat twice, and outruns WALL•E. A lot.
- Medium Blending — The live-action segments.
- Meaningful Name — EVE; Shelby Forthright.
- Also, WALL•E's pronunciation of EVE ("Eevuh") could be discerned as Eva, the name for the Biblical Eve in certain other languages.
- The Messiah — WALL•E. Check the Wild Mass Guessing page for more.
- Megacorp — Buy-N-Large
- Misaimed Fandom — AUTO. Amusing how a character Andrew Stanton intended to have no character has fan clubs as well as tons of fanfiction and fanart.
- Moe Anthropomorphism — Nearly every robot in the movie has a piece of humanization fanart lurking on deviantArt somewhere.
- Neat Freak — M-O
- Never Trust A Trailer — Anyone else remember the trailers presenting this as "WALL•E vs. humanity for EVE?"
- No Water Proofing In The Future — The robot that supervises the swimming pool is not waterproof.
- Non Action Guy — WALL•E
- Oh Crap — "Not. Possible."
- Open Sesame — A machine requires voice authorization from the Captain.
- Post Kiss Catatonia — WALL•E completely freezes the first time EVE "kisses" him.
- Pre Mortem One Liner — "AUTO, you... are relieved of duty!"
- Product Placement — WALL•E's makeshift television is an iPod with a magnifier in front of it.
- EVE was designed by Jonathan Ive - product designer for Apple responsible for the design of the iMac, their laptops, the iPod and iPhone. (Not coincidentally, Steve Jobs is both CEO of Apple and was CEO of Pixar, until they merged with Disney, when he became the single largest shareholder of Disney/Pixar.)
- WALL•E's Boot-Up noise is also the noise a Mac makes when you turn it on.
- AUTO is voiced by Macintalk, the voice read-back program of Macintosh.
- Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits — The malfunctioning robots from the repair ward.
- Really Seven Hundred Years Old - Played quite literally straight.
- Ridiculously Human Robots — WALL•E teaches other robots human traits, and learned them himself from old recordings, but they all seem to have a really strong baseline to begin with.
- Robo Cam
- Robot Names — Of the backronym variety:
- WALL•E = Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class, a global Earth-cleaning bot. He later meets his larger cousin, WALL•A, which of course, is Axiom Class.
- EVE = Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator.
- BURN•E the repair-bot locked outside the Axiom gets his own DVD bonus feature.
- Many others. BRL-A, D-FIB, M-O ("Moe"), PR-T ("pretty"), HAN-S, VAQ-M, VN-GO...
- Reflective Eyes — The lens that make up WALL•E's eyes naturally do this.
- Robo Speak — The only one really guilty of this is AUTO, as the other robots can only say a few words, or use voice samples. They mostly communicate through beeps, hums, etc.
- Running Gag — M-O's never-ending quest to clean WALL•E.
- Say My Name — Most of the robots' dialogue.
- Scenery Gorn — Many loving shots of the ruined, abandoned, and frankly extremely bleak-looking megacity at the beginning of the film.
- Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale — The first space sequence.
- Shout Out — Tons, mostly to other sci-fi films, and most obviously 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Sigourney Weaver is the voice of the Axiom PA system, referencing Alien, Galaxy Quest, and perhaps the Futurama episode "Love and Rocket".
- Not to mention that WALL•E's "fully charged" and reboot sounds are the same as the iconic Apple start-up sound.
- While we're on the subject of Apple, AUTO has that Creepy Monotone because he's voiced by MacinTALK, Apple's text-to-speech program. M-O's "FOREIGN CONTAMINANT" directive is synthesized by the same.
- There are at LEAST three visual references when WALL•E is traveling in space. The solar flare before going to the ice rings references the opening of Star Trek Voyager. The drones flying out of the shuttle bay reference the runabouts from the opening of Star Trek Deep Space Nine and during the approach to the Axiom, the music sounds like the approach to the Death Star in Star Wars.
- There's an obvious reference to The Matrix, with the highly meaningful clothing shift from blue to red by the culturally awakened Muggles.
- WALL•E shares some minor similarities with Johnny 5, the robot from Short Circuit (1986), which caused quite a bit of controversy. In fact Andrew Stanton has publicly stated that WALL•E's eye design came from binoculars he saw at a baseball game, and any perceived similarity between the two characters is unintentional on his part. The only other similarity is their treads, which in WALL•E's case were stated to have been inspired by a unique wheelchair design.
- There's also a possible reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in COM-T's (the cycloptic keyboard robot) instrumental communication.
- Also, the scene where COM-T and WALL•E wave to each other seems similar to Chihiro's encounter with the Radishman in Spirited Away.
- AUTO was explicitly designed with HAL-9000 in mind.
- 2001's famous classical soundtrack is also evoked in two separate scenes with the Axiom's captain.
- AUTO's design, and the way he moves about the cockpit, also seems to be a direct reference to the Trimaxion (Max) from Flight Of The Navigator.
- There's also the A-113 reference, although it's a lot more blatant here than in many of Pixar's other films; here, it's the name of the directive AUTO follows to ensure the ship never returns to Earth
- WALL•E crashes into Sputnik 1 while leaving Earth for the first time.
- To say nothing of the numerous references to other Pixar films; the pizza delivery Toyota from Toy Story comes to mind.
- Short Distance Phone Call — The first two humans WALL•E meets.
- Self Destruct Mechanism — In the escape pods, for some strange reason.
- Soundtrack Dissonance — Oh yeah. In the very first minute, "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", a bright, cheery song, matches well with the opening shots of the galaxy... not so much with the revelation of what Earth has become that follows.
- Space Clothes — Mostly monochromatic jumpsuits and no shoes. When people want to wear another outfit (to wit: 'blue is the new red') the clothes change without being taken off. This is apparently an attribute of the chairs they ride in, as the suits quickly change back to red once the chair's functions are disabled or the person gets out of it. the suits are also very elastic, as a the humans go from obese to fit during the closing credits and never change clothes or create new ones. Since the humans are never shown off their chairs we can also assume the jumpsuits are very ...hygienic.
- The PR-Ts are said to help with hygiene as well as beautification.
- Space Does Not Work That Way — Again, the first space sequence. But who cares, it looks really friggin' cool.
- Space Is Noisy - ...Yeah, we'll repeat it again, who cares?
- Space Sailing - The Axiom was definitely reminiscent of a sea-going cruise ship.
- Spanner In The Works — Now let's see what happens to this perfectly planned community in space when we add one robot not built for the community's function...
- Stalker With A Crush — WALL•E. Think about it.
- *cough*
- While we're on the subject, Dude Shes Like In A Coma (Although nothing really happens. They're robots.)
- Good thing for him too, as it turns out she was recording everything.
- Synthetic Voice Actor — AUTO being voiced by MacinTALK, as noted above.
- Take That: "Stay the course," anyone?
- Tear Jerker — O-ho-ho yeah. Andrew "Finding Nemo" Stanton's name in the credits is fair warning. The one killer scene for everyone is when WALL•E's memories and personality have seemingly been erased and EVE is desperately trying to get him to remember.
- Tertiary Sexual Characteristics — Very subtly.
- Time Passes Montage — Shortly after WALL•E finds EVE, and after EVE takes the plant and falls into stasis
- Trash Of The Titans — Earth is covered with garbage, including a layer of defunct satellites in the upper atmosphere which spaceships have to plow through.
- True Loves Kiss — When WALL•E is essentially killed and then rebuilt by EVE, his memory is lost and EVE tries everything she can think of to bring him back, practically giving up she finally sadly "kisses" him and the electric spark jolts his memory.
- Trigger Happy — Upon arriving on Earth, EVE shoots pretty much anything that moves. She does learn to calm down.
- Tsundere — EVE. Well, she's a girl with a temper that falls in love, anyway.
- Understatement — "We're having a slight malfunction – [SLAM!] with the autopilot!"
- Unusual User Interface — In the future, even advanced robots like COM-T will use keyboards... but the buttons will be nothing but Zeroes And Ones.
- Ugly Cute — WALL•E is a trash compactor, and still one of the most adorable movie stars ever made.
- Ugly Guy Hot Wife — Well, a trash compactor and a sleek, futuristic robot, anyway.
- Viral Marketing — Pixar set up a realistic Buy-N-Large website before the movie came out, though it's no longer online.
- Which sadly was taken down around the time the film came out. As stated earlier pieces of it can still be found online, but the whole of the site is not archived anywhere online.
- Well Intentioned Extremist — AUTO, arguably. Either that or he was afraid of becoming obsolete upon returning to Earth.
- What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome — The Captain, near the end of the movie.
- Wiki Walk — The captain does this when obsessed with learning more about Earth and plowing through the Axiom's archives on human history.
- The Woobie — They might as well have named him WOOB•E.
- White And Grey Morality — There are no clear villains in WALL•E. AUTO simply does as he's programmed to do, as are any other "evil" robots. The humans of the story, once jolted out of their reverie, proceed to repair the earth with new found love for nature and life.
- Worthless Yellow Rocks — WALL•E finds a diamond ring in a box, and tosses the ring aside to play with the box. And walks on a carpet of dollar, er, B&L bills.
- Reiterated in the 2009 Oscar's Animation Yearbook montage, where WALL•E finds an Oscar statue and a battered tape of said montage inside the plant's fridge. He naturally tosses the statue and takes the tape back home to watch. Ironic in that WALL•E had just won Best Animated Feature.
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