I had high expectations for this anime and wasn’t disappointed. The anime is full of delicate portray of emotions and touches on some deeper themes (Spoilers ahead). The anime can easily to made into a dystopia in several ways if we think about the power of robot or people’s tendencies to behave in a situation portrayed in the anime. On a personal level, Wall-E’s memory loss can be comparable with people with Alzheimer’s disease. If Wall-E didn’t get his memory back, is he the same being as the old Wall-E, and what to make of the shared experience between the two? Robot’s in general identical and replaceable as opposed to human being for now, but this would be questions we have to face if we can successfully make copies/uploads of ourselves in one way or another.
Here is an interview with the anime director with some quotes below:
it was literally born from the sentence, “What if humankind left earth and somebody left the last robot on, and it just kept doing the same futile thing forever?” And I thought that was the saddest, loneliest character I ever heard of in my life.But definitely it had that first man, first female theme. But I wasn’t trying to replace man in the bigger story. I just loved the poetic-ness that these two machines held more care for living and loving than humanity had anymore.The theme that I was trying to tap into was that irrational love defeats life’s programming—that it takes a random act of loving kindness to kick us out of our routines and habit. You could blame consumerism as one thing that’s happening in this film, but there’s a million other things we do that distract us from connecting to the person next to us and from furthering relationships, which is truly the point of living. So I came up with the idea that as WALL•E was picking up trash, it would have all these signs of humanity for him to rifle through, to get him interested in what humans were all about. I loved the idea of WALL•E finding something real. He was fascinated with the idea of living. And what’s the point of living? Something real. He was a manmade object with something real inside him. And he found something real while surrounded by manmade objects. That just was poetic for me.
I wasn’t trying to make the humans into fat, lazy consumers, but to make humanity appear to be completely consumed by everything that can distract you—to the point where they lost connection with each other, even though they’re right next to each other.
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