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From: me myself and monkfish on 1 Aug 2008 03:10
http://www.24dash.com/news/communities/2008-07-29-Emotibot-brings-out-the-best-and-worst-in-children

I like the bit in the article where it describes the plot of the film
Wall-E as "a lonely robot look[ing] for love on a deserted planet
Earth".

When i saw that film, i related very much to Wall-E, painfully so at
times. And that could be a description of large portions of my
life . . . except:

i) While Wall-E is a robot with an unusual capacity for human
emotions, i am a human incapable of the full range of depth of
feeling. Wall-E is a humanised robot; i am a dehumanised person.
Starting from two radically different origins, the net result of Wall-
E's happy excesses and my own unfortunate poverty is that we meet more
or less in the middle, but each heading in two very different
directions.

ii) Wall-E's isolation dervies from the circumstance of living alone
on a future planet earth from which humans have fled into deep space.
He spends his days cleaning up the mess that they have left behind so
that it will be ready for them the day they return and end his
loneliness. I am surrounded by people, yet the orbit of their lives
is so remote from mine that any form of meeting between us remains
impossible. It is not physical distance that seperates me from them,
however, but something much more pernicious. It is the chasm that
lies between the living and the un-dead. Wall-E lives in an abandoned
world. But in my case, the world is not dead. I am. In the absence
of people, Wall-E has made the whole world his home. I languish in
nooks and crannies. I eat crumbs off the floor. I lap rain-water
from puddles streaked with the rainbow film of oil stains. Wall-E
roams freely. His is an expansive existence. I am a ghost wandering
aimlessly, endlessly, through empty spaces. I sift through other
people's left-behinds and forgotten throw-aways as a pathetic
substitute for living, breathing contact with the people whose
existence they foreclose. Mine is a narrow, constricted existence.
I've made a world of my home.

We may live on the same planet, Wall-E and i, but ours are two very
different worlds.

iii) But the main difference, of course, is that since this is
hollywood film, for kids, i don't think it will ruin the ending for
anyone if i reveal that Wall-E eventually gets the girl-robot of his
dreams.


monkfish - a lonely robot looking for love in a dead and polluted
world

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