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Wall-E's portrayal of artificial intelligence and environmental destruction

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Film Analysis of the film Wall-E

Wall-E is a sci-Fi film that shows displays a story of lonely robot that has been left on Earth in order to clean up the mess humanity's has made. Disney-Pixar's, Wall-e, through analyzation is a film that is capable of opening a lot of eyes to how human beings treat the environment and where the future of the earth could be headed if human beings do not wake up and start treating it better than they are doing. The film, Wall-e, claims that if people do not start becoming more responsible with their ways, the planet could be demolished. Throughout the movie we are given many unrealistic and misleading examples. Wall-e was able to send the message of how Earth world could get to the point of destruction in an unreasonable way. Drinking food out of cups, a saying, and reinstating Earth from nothing are all improbable examples of what is revealed in the film (Hopps). With that said, he moral depicted in this Sci-Fi movie shows how humankind's over dependence on technology can pull people from wonders of creation and hinders them from be able to live life to the completest will be carefully inspected through a narrative viewpoint.

Relation to Science

Wall-E was able to addresses a couple of core themes of Science Fiction which is called artificial intelligence. The question that the film brings up to the viewer is things like what becomes of robots that are turning into intelligent machines? Are they actually developing personalities, and will these make them stray from their purposes?

There are some exact examples of classic science fiction films that are similar to the exact themes that the film is showing. A couple of those films are called i-Robot and 2001: A Space Oddysey. There appears to be some kind of a general fear of the potentials of artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, robots are considered to be stronger, smarter, stronger, and faster than human beings (Murray and Heumann). Walking away from viewing the film, the question comes up what is to stop them from turning against their creators and then taking over?

To a degree, Wall-E mirrors this type of fear that the audiences can see. The other parts of the movie display several characters that appear to fit this type of mold. For instance, in one scene, a direct reference is actually made to Space Oddysey (Stanton). Also to mention, the famous theme from Space Odyssey plays out as a somewhat like an epic battle which unfolds on screen. It is apparent that the reference to Hal and Dave is unmistakable.

However there is a brighter, more contented side to this theme of the movie. Eve and Wall-E are both two machines that are talented with artificial intelligence, and maybe beyond any other robot in the movie because they are the only machines that are able to create their own humane personalities (Ball). Rather than turning them into villains, these characters turn themselves into heroes that act just like human beings. It is a fascinating reversal of this classic science fiction subject.

Is it Realistic?

In the start of the movie we are presented to Wall-e, the trash compressing robot. Everyone is shown how trashed up the Earth is, while it is being cleaned up by a robot. There is holographic television all around marketing the axiom. At this point the questions started for me. How the electricity is able to power the TV's and billboard advertisements when there is no power? What is the purpose of there being only one robot left? In the beginning I was inquiring how the planet got so trashed from the start, nonetheless I responded to my own questions, bearing in mind the human race has turn out to be tremendously reckless with their over ingesting and extravagant habits. Which is the reason why in Wall-e they moved the human beings over to the axiom? The axiom is a flying spaceship that was built for the human race to live in, while the robots clean up the Earth. But once more, questions continued to keep coming to the mind.

How were they able to make the decision on what humans would get a ticket for the axiom, or and which one would not? The film showed how the president and he president clearly had to stay back, but who else had to? Where they responsible for buying the tickets? Wall-e starts everyone off in the movie with so many unanswered questions. For Wall-e to be a little more realistic to its' audiences, it would needed to have started us off on a clean start. It would have been more proper to have been informed everyone with the answers to all the questions that the viewers are left hanging on with. This is basically all the more motive for everyone to deliberate it to be unrealistic.

Characterization without Dialogue

The Pixar animators seemed to do great job when they were able to flesh out the characters of Eve and Wall-E. Neither of them speaks any English, however their tone and body language and how they use it has basically made up or the speech part. Wall-E appears to come across as a fellow that is kind of quirky. He has deceptively been at his job way too long, and Wall-E goes through the same routine every day. He is vastly lonely and begins taking on some human characteristics because he starts to fall in love with insects which is something only human beings can do. This shows the development of relationship which is something machines do not need.

Wall-E's job provides a foretaste into his personality. By gathering garbage and crushing it into compact blocks, he is able to establish the waste into giant skyscrapers. One of the first acts of the movie slates through a windy city with huge structures made of garbage that were surrounding the old, traditional constructions. He is very matriculate about what he does, but does not talk much in doing it.

In the middle of this isolated work, robot Eve abruptly falls into Wall-E's world. As a robot, she is everything he is and she is the one that has more human tendencies than Wall-E. Both Wall-E and Eve are endearing robots, however their incompatible personalities generate a lot of funniness for the movie. Their association is complex, and anyone can see it grow during the course of the film in their connections, body language and shrugs. However, it was apparent that their body language was very much humanlike not to mention their emotion towards one another. Nothing about them was robotic. Theirs is a really moving love story, and it feels real and authentic. Dialogue is most surely not necessary in the film.

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Anthropomorphized Robots

Wall-E appears to be the only robot in the film that is totally anthropomorphized, even though it is unclear if the civilized facets of his "personality" are a part of his indoctrination or established over time. He spent over 700 years quarantined on earth gathering ornaments that humans had left behind and then looking at old films that showed some kind of human emotion. He is then able to record, learns, and achieves the dances the he watches in old human musicals (Barnes). The robot also started to befriend things such as a cockroach and the starts to express some kind of honest concern for its security whenever it gets zapped, crushed, or vulnerable in any kind of way.

When it comes to being anthropomorphized, WALL-E was also displaying a lot of the qualities that show human interactions and comprehension as described by many field studies by Turkle. Just like Cog, WALL-E has the capability of physical acknowledgment and continually makes eye contact. In a lot of the different scenes, WALL-E even definitely follows around EVE with his eyes out of what could be called infatuation. Just like Kismet, WALL-E utilizes articulation (Corliss). Even though he does not do a lot of talking or conversing with many real words in over the sequence of the film, he is able to start showing some kind of fear, love excitement, and irritation with the articulation of his speech. WALL-E's physical acknowledgment, emotion-conveying inflection and strong eye contact, which is united with the numerous physical acts (for instance the holding of hands) that he tries to achieve, it is extremely obvious that he is proficient of feeling.

EVE relationship with WALL-E turns out to be much more complex, EVE develops to be more anthropomorphized, even to the fact that she disrespects all of her very strict orders. This development likewise has social suggestions about these generations (Barnes). The movie makes the point that if these robots are able to become more humanized after dependable contact to civilized straight communication, it is not too late for human beings. The movie appears to be suggesting that as human beings we need to discover some sort of balance in the way that people utilized technology, for the reason that just as EVE turned out to be humanized after head-on interaction, people can also lose their humanity if they rely too much on machines for social inspiration.

WALL-E's capability to display emotion that was really genuine is juxtaposed in contradiction of the inability for humans of his generation to be able to do the exact same. They never had any kind of direct eye contact no matter if sitting next to another human being. If sitting with a human being, it is sporadic that they will even identify that the individual is there. The movie showed that each human persistently just stares into his or her holographic view, being very insensitive to one another. This type illustration is not far off at all from how Turkle observes this generation. People learn to interrelate from behind the ease of a cell phone or a computer screen. Even having some kind of a phone call appears to be really invasive (Sciretta). The movie did a very good job as showing of machines having more human-like characteristics than human beings themselves in WALL-E has collective insinuations in regards to the current generation. The movie also did a very good job in showing that a holographic screen is simply a more moveable computer screen. It is clear that the movie wanted to show that as people start to hide behind the screen of any type of technology for social communication, they are actually giving up the many features of head-on contact that people define as intrinsically human.

This film show cruel and insensitive the humans are and that the robots are taking over as the ones that have the real emotions. The movie was movie did a great job in showing how human the robots were becoming. The machines that were leftover are newer models and maybe their programming is of course less human-like or they have had less communication with humans that are outside of the unconventional travelers of the Axiom. It is apparent that the one that produces clear anthropomorphized potentials over time is EVE.

She starts showing the exact same emotions of a human woman. Of course, at first EVE really does appear to be chastely an impassive robot that only follows the "orders" of her programming. Since EVE was a woman robot, she developed the same sentiments and emotions that a human woman was experiencing. In fact, it was obvious that the movie wanted to show her as more human than an actual woman.

The association that WALL-E starts to shape with EVE is harder and anthropomorphized than any other association that is talked about in the movie. It is clear that the movie was teaching the watcher that human beings are losing their sensitivity towards things on the earth whereas the machines are the ones that start to feel more human.

In conclusion, it was clear that this movie had a lot of lessons that it wanted to display. Some could look at it and think that the movie was made to bash humans. It is obvious that Walle-E has done a brilliant job in showing how we human beings have really lost our touch of reality and our sensitivity.

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Global Implications573 words
The movie has two global implications that it shows very well. The first one is a message that is in regards to the environment on…
References
7 sources cited in this paper
  • Ball, Sarah. " "Mr. Oscar, Tear Down This Wall! Andrew Stanton on How Animated Films are Pigeonholed – and How Wall-E is Every Man"." Newsweek 23 April 2009: 12-34.
  • Barnes, Brooks. ""Disney and Pixar: The Power of the Prenup." The New York Times 5 March 2009: 23-37.
  • Corliss, Richard. " "WALL-E (2008) – Best Movies, TV, Books and Theater of the Decade"." Time 8 March 2009: 21-24.
  • Hopps, John. "Walle-E World." Disney Films 9 March 2011: 23-25.
  • Murray, Robin L. and Joseph K. Heumann. ". "WALL-E: From Environmental Adaptation to Sentimental Nostalgia." Time 2 March 2010: 12.
  • Sciretta, Peter. ""3-Disc Special Edition of WALL-E." Film 11 December 2009: 45.
  • WALL-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Pixar. 2012.
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PaperDue. (2013). Wall-E's portrayal of artificial intelligence and environmental destruction. PaperDue. https://www.paperdue.com/essay/film-analysis-of-the-film-100368

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