I found this to be an incredibly interesting thread, so I just wanted to jump in here with a few of my own thoughts and observations. I don’t think these have been mentioned here yet, but I’m sure most of you have identified these before. Here goes:
b[/b] I’ll start with a fairly obvious one; just throwing it out there. [spoil]When the holo detector is initiated, all of the humans are dressed in the new blue, except for John and Mary. Then when the humans fall off their chairs, they go back to the default red.[/spoil]
b[/b] It took me a while to realize that Wall-E himself breaks out of his programming at one point in the movie; I was focused too much on him breaking other characters out of their programming. Sure he’s developed personality and curiosity, but at the start of the film, he’s still doing his directive (for his own reasons).
It’s not until after Eve finds the plant and shuts down; in the scene (most beautiful scene, imo) where Wall-E sadly goes back to work and he compacts a single trash cube and stops to stare at it. From what we see in the film, this is the last cube Wall-E ever makes. [spoil](He makes a couple more in the end of the film, but I don’t count these because he’s in his lifeless, reset mode. He’s not himself.)[/spoil] From this point on, Eve is his directive. And I love the way he stops and stares so blankly at this cube; you can tell that he knows now that there is indeed more to life than his programming. I mean, how can you go back to your old life when you’ve caught a glimpse of the perfect life?
b[/b] The day count that the Captain states in the Axiom may be inaccurate, since some days may be longer/shorter than others. This is possible because they seem to have full control of the time of day. The Captain even rewinds the clock back to morning when he realizes that Auto waked him up late. So the hours they’ve spent on the Axiom may actually disagree with the amount of days they’ve spent on the Axiom.
b[/b] The children in the Axiom never smile until they are held by John and Mary. With that in mind, how were they conceived and who are their parents? Notice how there are so few of them compared to the rest of the population. Perhaps this implies that the human race has been slowly diminishing after years away from Earth.
b[/b] By the end of the film, [spoil]both Wall-E and Eve bots are essentially obsolete, on Earth. They are perhaps the only two types of bots (as far we know) that were designed solely to serve Operation Cleanup and Operation Recolonize, which have both been shut down. (One may argue that Wall-E can still be used to clean up the trash and Eve can still search for vegetation on Earth or in different planets.)[/spoil]
b[/b] When the captain watches the first video explaining [spoil]Operation Recolonize[/spoil], the BnL CEO breaks his flow when he says “Axiom” as if the name of the ship was only dubbed in. This implies that the Axiom is indeed only one of several/many other ships of its kind, all of which receive the same video from BnL.
b[/b] When Wall-E first sees the hand-holding in Hello Dolly!, he tries to intertwine his own fingers in one way, but then adjusts to a more comfortable position. This really makes you sense just how much of a human Wall-E has become, in that he can take preference from one thing over another. He can actually recognize when one hand position is more comfortable than another. That may be looking too deep into things, but when I first saw that, I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m like that too! I’m more comfortable with my left thumb on top of my right.”
Great thread!