page_title: WALL-E
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: WALL-E / Themes / Religion
caption_attribution_description: 1866–1870 engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), entitled "Le Lâcher de la colombe" ("The dove sent forth from the ark"). "Alors il lâcha d'auprès de lui la colombe pour voir si les eaux avaient diminué à la surface du sol." ("Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground.", Genesis 8, 8).
context_page_description: WALL-E is a 2008 American computer-animated science fiction romance film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It was directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, produced by Jim Morris, and co-written by Jim Reardon. It stars the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy and Sigourney Weaver, with Fred Willard in the film’s only prominent live-action role. The overall ninth feature film produced by the company, WALL-E follows a solitary trash compactor robot on a future, uninhabitable, deserted Earth, left to clean up garbage. However, he is visited by a probe sent by the starship Axiom, a robot called EVE, with whom he falls in love and pursues across the galaxy.
  After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt Pixar had created believable simulations of underwater physics and was willing to direct a film set largely in space. WALL-E has minimal dialogue in its early sequences; many of the characters do not have voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds designed by Burtt.
context_section_description: Stanton, who is a Christian, named EVE after the Biblical figure because WALL-E's loneliness reminded him of Adam, before God created his wife. Dreher noted EVE's biblical namesake and saw her directive as an inversion of that story; EVE uses the plant to tell humanity to return to Earth and move away from the "false god" of BnL and the lazy lifestyle it offers. Dreher also noted this departure from classical Christian viewpoints, where Adam is cursed to labor, in that WALL-E argues hard work is what makes humans human. Dreher emphasized the false god parallels to BnL in a scene where a robot teaches infants "B is for Buy n Large, your very best friend", which he compared to modern corporations such as McDonald's creating brand loyalty in children. Megan Basham of World magazine felt the film criticizes the pursuit of leisure, whereas WALL-E in his stewardship learns to truly appreciate God's creation.
  During writing, a Pixar employee noted to Jim Reardon that EVE was reminiscent of the dove with the olive branch from the story of Noah's Ark, and the story was reworked with EVE finding a plant to return humanity from its voyage. WALL-E himself has been compared to Prometheus, Sisyphus, and Butades: in an essay discussing WALL-E as representative of the artistic strive of Pixar itself, Hrag Vartanian compared WALL-E to Butades in a scene where the robot expresses his love for EVE by making a sculpture of her from spare parts. "The Ancient Greek tradition associates the birth of art with a Corinthian maiden who longing to preserve her lover's shadow traces it on the wall before he departed for war. The myth reminds us that art was born out of longing and often means more for the creator than the muse. In the same way Stanton and his Pixar team have told us a deeply personal story about their love of cinema and their vision for animation through the prism of all types of relationships."
caption: The Axiom and EVE have been compared to the legend of Noah's Ark and the dove that Noah sets forth from the Ark.
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