Andrew Stanton, director of WALL-E, described his protagonist in a 2008 interview as the last optimist on Earth. WALL-E has been alone for seven hundred years, compacting trash on a planet that humanity abandoned, with no company except a cockroach and a VHS copy of Hello, Dolly! that he watches on repeat. He should be broken. He should be a machine going through motions with no inner life. Instead, he collects interesting objects, watches musicals, holds his own hand during the romantic scenes, and waits, without any evidence that waiting will produce results, for something worth waiting for.

Pixar gave a garbage robot almost no dialogue and made him the most emotionally articulate character in their catalog. WALL-E communicates through gesture, through the angle of his binocular eyes, through the careful way he arranges a spork next to a collection of lighters. Dr. John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, whose research on the neuroscience of loneliness demonstrated that isolation physically changes the brain's structure, would recognize WALL-E as a portrait of loneliness that has not yet become despair, a being that has maintained hope through ritual and curiosity.

The Plant That Changed Everything

When EVE arrives, WALL-E falls in love immediately and completely. This is not shallow. This is seven hundred years of loneliness finding its object. He follows her through sandstorms. He shows her his collection. He tries to hold her hand. And when EVE finds a plant and shuts down to protect it, WALL-E sits beside her in the rain, holds an umbrella over her motionless body, and waits again, because waiting is what he knows how to do.

The plant is the smallest possible symbol of hope. A single green shoot in seven hundred years of trash. WALL-E does not understand its significance to humanity's return. He understands that EVE cares about it, and therefore he cares about it, because love makes other people's priorities your own.

The Robot Who Taught Humans to Walk

The humans aboard the Axiom have devolved into passive consumers, floating on hover chairs, fed by machines, entertained by screens. WALL-E's arrival disrupts their comfortable oblivion. He does not lecture them. He does not lead a revolution. He simply exists as a being that cares about things, that touches the world directly, that gets dirty and damaged and keeps going. His example, not his words, reminds the humans what it means to be present in your own life.