WALL-E/WMG

WALL-E suffers from a case of anterograde amnesia (Short-term memory loss), similar to that of Leonard Shelby.

 * His insistance to say his name at almost any time is the result of his short-term memory loss causing him to forget he ever said it to the people in question. Thus, he finds it important that he introduces himself with his customary greeting, "WAAALL-EEEE"
 * What? He only says his name to every character once.
 * WALL-E keeps himself in check and is the only remaining WALL-E due to the fact that he keeps himself in a routine naturally, something the other WALL-E's couldn't do. Naturally, these WALL-E's too must have suffered from anterograde amnesia.

WALL-E's plot occurs into the distant past. The events were later distorted into Legend and became the basis for The Bible.

 * The Axiom became the Ark.
 * As more and more of the technology was lost, a trip into space became a trip into the ocean, and the great garbage pileup became the great flood.
 * EVE is obviously the Dove from the Great Flood story, but was also later split into a woman in the tale of the Garden of Eden.
 * WALL-E of course, is
 * The sprout that grew out of the boot is the Tree of Knowledge.
 * Mary and John were obviously inspiration for the Virgin/Magdalen and the Baptist/the Beloved respectively.
 * AUTO is Lucifer. AUTO tries to tempt the passengers into living a comfortable-but-nihilistic existence aboard the Axiom rather than to restore Earth, using the Buy n' Large's command as an excuse.
 * In a far less imaginative, fun, and more reality-grounding WMG, Wall-E may just be a retelling of an Adam and Eve/Noah's Ark mash-up in clever child-friendly sci-fi form.
 * Fun theory, but there needs to be an explanation for how Hello Dolly! exists in the distant past.
 * Literary Agent Hypothesis. Albeit pulling the Literary Agent Hypothesis on a theory which is essentially about the same thing.
 * The actual video/song was lost in the annals of time (how could they preserve it forever?). Hello Dolly! was the best analogue they could find.
 * Because Hello Dolly! transcends time, space, and indeed humankind.
 * Fun theory, but people found no ruins of the Axiom and the robots. Jossed.
 * Actually, the Axiom's passengers may have decided to hide the truth from the future generation. After landing, the robots and humanity faked ancient history, and modeled the ancient empires from Buy n' Large and other corporations. The robots took the Axiom with them into space, making it appear like ascending into heaven, while humanity stayed to restore the planet and the rest is History.
 * It also fits with Fomenko's New Chronology theory.
 * Maybe the angels, satyrs, fairies, nymphs, mermaids, supernatural entities, etc. are actually robots sent to spy on us, which became inspirations for fairy tales.
 * And because we are destroying Earth once again, the robots will return, maybe in December 21, 2012.
 * Look at the movie's credits. It mirrors the progress of civilization. That is direct proof that WALL-E happened in the distant past.
 * Alternatively, WALL-E is both the future and the past, and we're in an endless loop of repeating civilizations. All the dinosaur bones and stuff were faked by BuyNLarge before they left, because they're dicks.
 * So this is the fifth age? Sixth? Seventh?
 * Faked isn't the right word. Dinosaur bones were tacky decorations for people's lawns. We're still stuck in the flamingo and gnome fad.
 * All this has happened before, and all this will happen again
 * It is, at the very least, the prehistory of the Pixar universe, maybe all CGI movie-verses. The humans on the ship "re-evolved" back to normal (almost), and the robots became the sapient toys - they stay out of the way of humans now that they're not needed to do every little thing.

In a theory tying into the one above, not only does the movie take place in the past, but there was more than one ship in Buy 'n' Large's fleet.
However, the humans on one of these smaller ships ended up differently than the Axiom's passengers. These humans managed to stay in shape and even colonized other planets in a galaxy far, far away. What does this lead to? You guessed it...
 * You're kidding, it's obvious from the evil AI that is AUTO that it leads here.
 * Nonsense, AUTO is jettisoned from the ship, breaks in half, and goes through a wormhole. Since he got split in half, he not only went insane, but each "robosome" which comprised his "male" identity separated. The "X" robosome went into an alternate dimension where it was discovered by an Aperture Science research pod and developed into a robot for experimental weapons testing, whereas the "Y" robosome half was used to build HAL. (incidentally, his eye was a separate piece entirely and drifted off with the Y robosome.
 * Furthermore, these universes exist entirely in the XKCD universe. And now to make sense of the BG and SW tie-ins. After the simultaneous events of Portal, Portal: Still Alive, any other Portal sequels, and 2001: Space Odyssey, the X and Y robosomes recombine, to once again be AUTO, which then creates BG. Oh, and, the SW thing happens uninterrupted because one of the smaller ships didn't have AUTO.
 * Likewise, C-3PO, R2-D2, and the rest of them were based on robotics technology originally developed by Buy 'n' Large before they changed from a Mega Corp into something else entirely. This organizational metamorphosis was marked by a name change from Buy 'n' Large to The Galactic Empire, which market research proved would be 130% more memorable on planets with no form of commerce, and, thus, no concept of "buying." Plus, the "BnL Death Star" would have just sounded odd.
 * Considering that there was a Republic before the Empire, which lasted several thousand years, it must be concluded that after a few millennia, people rebelled against BnL, forming their own government. BnL remained as a tiny dot on the galactic map, and over the centuries of Republic rule became the Corporate Sector, as you can't call yourself "Large" when you're a minority.
 * Relatedly, the fall of Buy 'n' Large occurred due to the rise of the Jedi- once people discovered a resource/Force that could not be controlled or regulated by BnL, its control started to slip as people looked to the Jedi for stability. Being peace-loving and minimalist in methods, the Jedi went on to support democratic self-rule
 * That or they became the Trade Federation.

Like the Zelda series, WALL-E has a forked timeline.
The timeline we see, where WALL-E finds the plant, leads to the events we see in the movie. However, in the timeline where he doesn't find the plant, he gets lonely after EVE leaves (as her findings were negative) and builds other robots to keep him company. For the other robot's bodies, he uses the most widely available mechanical devices: cars. Hundreds of years after this, the movie Cars takes place. This explains why said movie has both sentient cars and a complete lack of humans.
 * This, of course, means that WALL-E is the god of the world of Cars.
 * No no, Cars is the prequel a prototype for Wall-E is in Lightning McQueen's pit crew.
 * This troper always thought it'd be fun if Cars was a sequel to Stephen King's Trucks.
 * Could have been Robots, considering WALL-E's obsession with the music video. He built them to reenact the Hello Dolly film when the tape fell apart. (The darth vader voice chip was actually Vader's, from the example above; it fell out of his helmet while being transported to the moon of Endor's surface, and, by the laws of narrative probability, floated to the new, robot earth, where it was found by the speechless robot.)
 * Does that mean that in the timeline where the plant is found, and Earth is recolonized - maybe the remaining toxicity in the Earth's atmosphere causes sped-up mutations, allowing humans to develop superpowers eventually, which means the robots don't need to be mass-distributed anymore, and in a few generations.... The Incredibles.
 * Along with the Marvel universe, several decades before Mr. Incredible is born.
 * Does this mean Team Fortress 2 is descended from Wall-E too?
 * Of course. The announcer is GLaDOS, who is AUTO. Transitive Property here.

Same as above, only leading to a decidedly different forked timeline.
Picks up after the above theory leaves off with Wall-E building other robots. He first starts off building simple robots out of the junk around him, salvaging the circuitry from other Wall-E robots, giving them the same characteristics he has including his ability to "transform" into a box. Unbeknownst to him, he also transfers a "spark" of sentience to each of these robots. Eventually he starts making more and more sophisticated robots out of the abandoned cars lying around, once again building in a "transforming" capability. You can probably see where this is going too....
 * This would mean Earth becomes - no, not Cybertron, but rather the Junkion planet. The upstart robot race decides to leave the Earth just as the humans did, settling on a large asteroid that does become Cybertron, while other robots stay behind to become the Junkions.
 * However, one of the sentient robots leaving for what eventually becomes Cybertron is somehow left forgotten in Earth's orbit. With nothing but a bunch of old space junk to keep him company, he naturally begins to brood a lot of resentment. After the pasage of much time, he eventually learns to manipulate all the junk in orbit into a new, much larger body. Much larger, scarier, and with a deep Orson Welles-ish voice.
 * And eventually, a new planet is colonized by the humans, and society begins anew. That would explain some..."inconsistencies" between earth in Transformers and earth in the show.
 * Furthermore, if WALL-E is the source of the Transformers, he is Primus, and was sealed by his descendants inside the asteroid that became Cybertron because his aging circuits could no longer handle running his world.
 * It follows, of course, that The Matrix is a crystal version of WALL-E's Hello Dolly video, to which minds have been added over the years. It can destroy Unicron because, being his children, all Transformers have a love of Hello Dolly, and that love touches something buried deep in Unicron, specifically, something buried right around where the self destruct button is.

Alec Azam, from the short film Presto (which plays before WALL-E), was an Aperture Science test subject.
That rabbit was clearly thinking with portals.
 * On top of that, he was being strung along by an obviously sadistic authority figure with the promise of food after he finished his job, only to use said authority figure's "technology" against them in the end. Sound familiar?

Axiom technology was reverse engineered from the Daleks
A Dalek may have landed on pre-BnL Earth. The humans decided to kill it and harvest its technology, resulting in spaceships and robots. However, some of the machines acted like their technological ancestors with death rays, singular eyes, and phallic appearances. And the Dalek legacy is still seen in the form of a pink robot that shoots out make-up.
 * And the humans were slowly becoming Daleks. Honestly, they were just fat blobs in chairs that only communicated with technology. They are almost always in that chair.

Buy 'N' Large is real
They will soon start marketing real WALL-E robots.
 * That is, unless Disney/Pixar beats 'em to it...
 * I doubt it was just silliness that Pixar decided to have the BnL logo and jingle play after the Disney and Pixar logos after the credits.
 * They're already here, and they're called ROOMBA.
 * Dude, it's Virgin. Check out the red and white colouring. Not to mention the commercial spacecraft.
 * Okay, THAT thought is Nightmare Fuel because I've been eagerly following their spacecraft development.
 * They actually have an aircraft named EVE, BTW.
 * At some point they're going to eat Toyota for their fantastic wheel chairs couches.
 * There's actually a real group called the WALLâ€¢E Builders and they have built many different robots from the film including WALL-E, EVE, M-O and Auto.

The cockroach is actually a robot.
No reason for an organism (even a cockroach, as "invincible" as they seem) to survive those things OR run as fast as it did.
 * This troper disagrees, given that she once crushed a cockroach under a bookend at least a few times the cockroach's weight, only for it to scamper on its merry way once the bookend was removed. Also, it did move extremely fast.
 * The cockroach had clearly mutated and evolved thanks to all the toxicity, and developed dog-level intelligence and self-awareness. Its descendants go on to become a favourite kind of pet for robots and possibly humans.

WALL-E takes place in the same universe as Vectorman.
Both involve humanity abandoning Earth due to pollution & leaving robots to clean up.
 * Buuut! The timeline splits before the movie, at whether BnL becomes the dominant company or not. If BnL does, than they use older technology. If BnL doesn't, then we discover the Orbot technology.
 * Though come to think of it, EVE might be some kind of prototype Orbot, what with the floating body parts and ridiculous firepower.

The entire plot is predicated on the prediction that, some time in our future, there will be a merger between Wal-Mart and the United Nations.
Regardless of your political beliefs, this idea will scare the shit out of you if you think too long about it.
 * It actually makes more sense that Buy is a government/corporate hybrid. It's virtually impossible for a corporation to gain monopoly status and hold it for very long without government sanction; once the corporation's profit margins reach a certain point, other companies pile into that particular industry. Most likely, Buy&Large was a GSE that was "too big to fail", and kept getting bailout after bailout, using government funding to buy out competitors until it was the only corporation left.
 * Which means that this is not about "Wal-Mart and the United Nations." It's about "communism and communism." Hope and change, my friend, hope and change.
 * That was pretty much my interpretation. Specifically, although the film gives a specific meaning to the acronymn, the name WALL-E certainly sounds like one which a robot made by Wallmart might have.
 * I always thought Buy-N-Large was a little too benevolent for a corrupt megacorporation. Building a giant fleet of spaceships to cart the entire human race offworld, with plans to stay there indefinitely, while zillions of robots you designed and built stay on earth to clean up after yourself? All on the company's dime? Come on. Merging with the government explains this plot hole pretty well.
 * Buy-N-Large is a secret branch of the Apeture Science Marketing department.

The Wall-E units are imported from Tatooine.
Seriously, I swear I've seen a droid in one of the Star Wars movies that looked almost exactly like Wall-E.
 * Were you perhaps thinking about Luke's Treadwell farming droid from A New Hope? If that's the case, then yes, the resemblance is quite uncanny. The only real difference is that Wall-E has a much shorter neck and a more substantial body...
 * Not to mention that the two L's in WALL-E's name stand for Load Lifter. A certain type of droid in Star Wars is known as a Binary Load Lifter.

In the timeline in which WALL-E doesn't find the tape of Hello, Dolly!, he becomes extremely depressed and lonely.
Several hundred years later, however, he is found by a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation spaceship. Impressed by his highly developed personality, they bring him onboard and use his altered programming as the basis of their Genuine People Personalities technology. For the prototype, they simply transplant WALL-E's personality into a more advanced robot model, resulting in...Marvin the Paranoid Android.
 * Marvin's pains in the diodes down his left side are caused by a failure to adjust some of WALL-E's programming code to the new robot body.
 * Oh, and needless to say, this is all based on an alternate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy/WALL-E timeline in which a ship in the BnL starfleet reached Alpha Centauri before the destruction of Earth.
 * Eddies in the space-time continuum. While trying to compact a particularly ugly couch into garbage, WALL-E is dumped onto prehistoric Earth. With no garbage and no Hello Dolly he develops a split personality: his aforementioned "Marvin" personality, and his new obsessively happy mode towards anything that looks human and/or speaks english. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation comes to ZZ 9 plural z alpha to see if any of the planets have useful robot-building materials, find the Golgafrinchan "civilization", and run away as quickly as possible. Having a vague recollection of Eve being taken away in a spaceship, he hitches a ride on a stabilizer fin, but his outer shell is totaled by the time they reach the next star system. Sirius Cybernetics salvages what they can for their AI prototypes, and eventually, after several million years of delay from drunkenness before the future H2G2 founders are fired, Marvin and the automatic doors are finally made available for purchase. (There's another bit where an unretrieved EVE unit goes even further back and inspires the makers of the Krikkit robots, but I think you can figure it out from the premise.)
 * Furthermore, the Earth regains plant-life, and even more humans. And then the original humans, now living on Planet Golgafrincham, send the useless middle men back to Earth, for they think that Earth is still a giant garbage dump. this is 1 million years after the creation of earth by Deep Thought, so Arthur was wrong about when they were, and the question is true, proving that everyone and everything in the universe is as thick-headed as a lead brick.
 * Actually, he just remains as he was originally, and as he was just after EVE repaired him. Kind of boring, really.
 * And there's also the qestion of what would have happened if he had found a totally different film...
 * This Troper has now been thinking much of this idea...say, what if WALL-E found a porno? (Yeah-I-Went-There)

== Wall-E is either a Reploid himself or salvaged Reploid parts, thereby granting him sentience, and possess a benign variant of the Maverick Virus that imbues other robots with sentience. == The world of Wall-E has some minimal similarities with the world of Mega Man X, especially as the X universe approaches an apocalyptic state. Also note the superficial similarities of design between the earlier Mega Man games, BnL products, and the Axiom- steamlined, shiny, and smooth with few visible moving parts and lots of highly-advanced technology. What may have taken place is this:

Thomas Light was one of the majority stockholders of BnL prior to his death. After going public, BnL decides to sideline anthropomorphic robots, though they are still produced steadily, in favor of ever-more-abusive consumer products. Shortly after using up most of the earth's resources and thoroughly trashing it, BnL begins its Axiom project. Those humans left behind form the basis of the cleanup crews and residual society, while other city-spacecraft are constructed. During this period the works of an obscure researcher, Doctor Cain, result in the creation of Reploids, and the cleanup crews left behind by BnL rejoice to have relatively durable, inhuman assistance to do the work for them. A few genuine Mavericks quickly seize upon the resentment Reploids feel at having to clean up humanity's mess as their first acts in life, and the wars documented in the X games take place. Eventually, all remaining humans flee from the planet in various directions, and the Reploids, fed up with Earth altogether, do the same thing. A few crippled mechaniloids are left behind but gradually begin to die off, eventually leaving Earth a dusty, barren world devoid of most human or mechanical life.

After this epic struggle, a lone Wall-E unit, still following his original directive for lack of anything better to do, begins to scavenge parts from mechaniloids and Reploids alike to keep himself working. (Perhaps even from older-generation robots, such as....possibly Mega Man himself, long-since retired?) In the process he comes across a form of the Maverick virus, degraded from corruptions in the code. The virus jumpstarts his own natural turn towards sapience, sentimentality, and emotion, and also allows him to impart this evolution toother Mechaniloids, thus explaining how he seems almost supernaturally able both to feel and to make other robots feel and act more human-like.

WALL-E looks like E.T.
He does.
 * So it's not just me!
 * Confirmed by Word of God, his neck and eyes were taken from E.T.
 * Citation? Because I clearly recall Andrew Stanton saying that the idea for WALL-E's eyes came from a pair of binoculars someone gave him to follow a baseball game.
 * Hey, hang on...

"WALL-E" is a distant prequel to "E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial"!
After many years of helping the humans settle on Earth, WALL-E and EVE (and their many, many newly-built, er, descendants) set out in a ship to find other planets capable of supporting life. Presumably, that'd be where some of the other Buy n Large ships (see below) may have gone. Along the way, they meet an alien race who help them with their advanced technology, including the ability to integrate cybernetics into biological bodies. The resultant new creatures set up a base on a Green Planet and head off to explore the galaxy. Over time, their search extends to studying the botanical life of each planet they visit. Centuries pass and one of the binocular-faced plant-obsessed beings is stranded on Earth and befriends a little boy and...
 * This goes a long way in explaining why bits of E.T. light up, why he can levitate things, why he collects plants...

"WALL-E" takes place in the same universe as Firefly.
The timelines coincide too much to ignore it. "Earth got used up." Literally, becoming a trash planet as its resources were depleted. The Axiom was just left behind because of an engine stall or something. Along the way to the new giant solar system, a few crews separated and mutinied based on their original cultures before they were diluted by BnL. The ships changed as western and eastern culture returned. The Corrupt Corporate Executives of BnL became "Key members of Parliament" and formed the inner planets with the alliance, as the richest and best because they had the most money. Also, whoever built WALL-E also built R2-D2 and was the first reader (and a timelord, which might explain the schizo tech.) It has something to do with metal. The Tams are his descendants. River gains her psychic abilities by an interface with the needle they stab in her forehead at the beginning of The Movie. This needle might contain nanoprobes with the same personality as WALL-E. These nanoprobes are also used through an alternate universe against species 8472, who die to it from pure annoyance at Hello Dolly constantly playing through their heads. Or maybe I'm reading into this too much.
 * Also, if you look at the doors by the repair lab(and a few other places), you'll see that the letters on them are Chinese. This probably means that the Asians are also powerful in WALL-E, which furthers the evidence that the two shows take place in the same universe.
 * That only means you have one of the glitched copies of the DVD; in the standard US release, the letters are in English.

The Axiom is only one of many ships
As pointed out to this troper by whiny people, the population of the Axiom is mostly white English speaking people. This is because dozens of massive spacecraft were sent out from all over the world, and the Axiom is just the one carrying the descendants of, say, the US East Coast. There may or may not be some sort of mutated survivor race lurking in the third world regions of Earth that couldn't afford to build huge spacefaring luxury resorts, and most of Earth's bloated population is still drifting aimlessly through space.
 * This makes sense, because as large as the Axiom is, there's no way it's large enough to comfortably hold a couple of billion people -- and that's assuming that only members of the middle and upper classes were able to afford tickets.
 * Confirmed by Word of God in the DVD extras: the Axiom can hold 600,000 humans and 500,000 robots. They'd need roughly 4 to 5 ships to contain the population of a city like New York City.
 * Well, the president of BnL had to have had some ship of his own for he and his staff to leave.
 * This isn't a mad theory, this is confirmed by the movie. The Axiom is specifically said to be 'the jewel of the Buy 'N' Large Fleet', and dozens of ships are seen taking off.
 * Although it would take between 10,000 and 11,000 ships to get all of our current population into space, at 600,000 per ship.
 * Perhaps due to the massive amounts of pollution and the decreased amount of resources, the population decreased significantly some time before the ships took off.
 * The Axiom is 'the jewel of the Buy 'N' Large Fleet'. There is nothing to say that this is the only fleet. other organizations may have built much larger ships.

The Axiom and other minor ships only took the part of the population that could afford being there
BnL being a fierce capitalist force cared only about money and sent on the ships only the people that could pay the price to enter, everybody else was left behind and died
 * It would explain the overwhelmingly white, English-speaking population of the Axiom.
 * Wow. Reminds me of the 2012 movie.

The Axiom's population is controlled, or is immortal.
When the Captain asks for a report on the population, the ship says "unchanged". If the Axiom's been floating around for hundreds of years, that must mean that (A)Certain people are killed off immediately (by population-suppression bots) as others are born or (B)The people (even the babies) never, ever age. Perhaps they have a template for people and they're grown in some farm. That way genetic diversity could be preserved, and I'd give one guess as to who had access to the template. (he has a red eye)
 * Or it was unchanged from the previous "day".
 * In a spaceship, the population has to be strictly controlled: too many and you run out of supplies, too few and you don't have a viable gene pool. But considering the population didn't exactly have libidos (or the ability to go through the motions), robots taking control of cloning or test-tube babies seems much more likely.
 * This Troper would like to remind you that Soylent Green is people. Have a nice day! ^_^
 * This troper would alternatively like to suggest that, corollary to cloning, they might not have killed off passengers when babies were born so much as cloned babies when passengers died.
 * So the Axiom is like the controlled city in The Movie of Aeon Flux except the people just don't care? Would that make AUTO Trevor Goodchild?
 * This troper was under the impression that no Axiomites were interested in procreation, mainly because of the size of them, but this brings it's own plot holes...

BnL developed post-scarcity technology
If you look at the BnL news site, the economy seems to be some kind of giant game/sham. Massive chunks of the population have nothing better to do with their lives than shop incessantly. Robots are in the process of replacing even the most human of jobs. Obviously, at some point BnL developed technology that made the cost of manufacturing anything from food to spaceships virtually nil. Like any reasonable company, they tried to (and succeeded at) make a profit from this technology...and things rapidly spiraled out of control as virtually free goods and a lack of constructive activities caused the culture of hyper-consumerism we saw in the movie.
 * This would also explain the self-sustaining population of the Axiom. Star Trek-style replicators and the advances of robotics technology have eliminated the need to work at all, and people bought into the BnL lifestyle of doing absolutely nothing- their descendants found it incredibly boring, but by then it was too late as they knew nothing else. It even makes the ending better, since humanity is restoring Earth not out of necessity, but because they want to rediscover their humanity.
 * Or maybe it was out of necessity of rediscovering their humanity.

Wall-E is a Toy
We know by Word of God that our Wall-E was the only robot that actually worked. Why? Because this takes place in the future of Toy Story. 700 years ago, not everyone was rich enough to flee in the BnL ships. One poor family that stayed behind to eventually suffocate survived long enough for their child to find a malfunctioned Wall-E and take some final comfort in playing with him. This made him come alive. When the child died, Wall-E's core programming was able to interact with his Toy status enough to keep him running.
 * All other Toys either went with their owners on BnL ships or died when there were no more children left on the planet.
 * Well, they "died" only in the sense that they were no longer sentient, as shown by WALL-E's Hamm doll.
 * This theory explains how Eve's "Kiss"
 * Wait, does that make
 * OH YES! This just

BnL's robots are developed and manufactured by a subsidiary. That subsidiary is Sumdac Systems.
The similarities between Sumdac's machines and BnL's are many; semi-sapient, autonomously functioning, produced in the 22nd century, and posssed of a limited "transformation" ability that lets them convert into more compact modes. At some point, BnL will purchase Sumdac systems.
 * You do realize this makes for two Transformers tie-ins, right?

Oh snap, there's no Neon Genesis Evangelion theory yet - Uh, I mean, the movie takes place centuries after "End of Evangelion".
After... whatever happened at the End of Evangelion, there were only two humans left. The Axiom and other ships like it were full of the people who could afford to leave Earth, thus escaping Final Impact. Meanwhile, on Earth, Shinji builds a little robot for company and integrates some of his personality into it. Buy N Large just took all the credit.
 * Alternatively, E.V.E. is the "ancestor" of all E V A units.
 * But Lilith is the ancestor of the Eva units. Unless... E.V.E. added biological components, eventually becoming Lilith.
 * Given that Rei is sorta kinda Lilith, this means she really mellowed out over the years
 * This also means that WALL-E, as EVE's counterpart, also added biological components, becoming Adam. It follows, of course, that the Angels are what is left of the various other ships of humans, reduced to mad mutants by millenia in space. WALL-E/Adam's whole "explode upon contact with Lilith and Angels, taking out most of planet" thing, then, is a really misaimed attempt at restoring them to the way he remembers by destroying all that extra stuff, badly overcharged because he still isn't used to his new body, and his mind is going. Hey, he's pretty battered under all that junk and biological stuff, you'd be senile too.
 * Alternativley, the 'splode on contact' is just the 'sparking kiss' turned Up to Eleven

Why do robots have personality?
Eve, Mo, and the other robots from the Axiom have personalities so they can interact with humans as needed, at the very least the captain. But why Wallâ€¢E? Why would he need a personality? (And indeed, at the end, why does he seem to have none again?)

My theory is that Wallâ€¢E was built around some kind of base code, which was used to make all sorts of robots. Those who needed personalities had the personality code 'linked' into their operation, those who didn't need them (like Wallâ€¢E) had it just locked away rather than actually deleted. (This is common programming practice; it takes more work to delete than to just lock away.) Wallâ€¢E, over years of operation far outstripping the intended usage, has had corrupted code that's linked back into his personality coding, but the unpredictable nature of it has made his personality somewhat neurotic.


 * Or, alternately, you can believe this little oneshot.
 * The robots in WALL-E are shown to be very intelligent and capable, especially WALL-E himself. I assume that robots designed to work for long periods of time alone on planetary surfaces are equipped with strong problem-solving and awareness modules, which effectively develop into sentience.
 * Wall-E gained a personality from his constant exposure to Hello Dolly. Not because of Hello Dolly itself, but because it was the only external stimuli that would appeal to higher brain functions. AI functions. Whatever. Also, the songs and their core values helped to develop his personality. If he had been exposed to some other song over the years, his personality would have changed accordingly:
 * Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne: Wall-E would have taken a much more direct approach to courting EVE. Unfortunetly, EVE would be so terrified by the horrifying trash beast and his sounds that she would have blown him up right then and there, and the movie would've ended.
 * Caramelldansen: everyone in the audience while watching the movie would get diabetes.
 * You've Got the Touch: Wall-E would be very, very Badass. Also, his collection of stuff would be bigger.
 * And shinier.
 * Never Gonna Give You Up: Same as above, only he would try to court MO instead of EVE>
 * I shudder to think what would've happened if Wall-E had found Miley Cyrus' "Best of Both Worlds".
 * Annihilation of mankind for its crimes. We got very, very lucky.
 * The Katamari theme: He would have acted the same as an a sentient WALL-E, but peppier. And EVE would have been rolled into the Big Ball of Garbage.
 * It's A Wonderful World: The movie never would have happened because something would wind up killing him by the time the song finished playing.
 * Ha ha, now you've got me amused thinking what would have happened had the film been The Wall and Wall-E had been listening to Pink Floyd. I find that a twistedly delightful notion.
 * If it had been Haruhi Suzumiya, Wall-E would have kidnaped... err... kindly asked EVE to join his version of the S.O.S. Brigade due to the fact she an "alien", eventually forcing... err.. asking kindly him nicely to let him go with her to find find an "Esper" robot and a robot from the future. However Wall-E would be unsure whether she's the "Yuki" due to being an alien or the "Kyon" due to him dragging her around and forcing to do things.
 * American Psycho: Wall-E, sick of being constantly confused by the myriads of other Wall-Es that look and act exactly like him, kills them all. He meets Eve, who is also a trigger happy murderer of the most deranged kind. He falls in love with her.
 * Michael Jackson: Your Mileage May Vary. I personally like the image of him trying to moonwalk and painting one hand silver.
 * Elton John: Depends on when, but high treads and outrageous optical sensors come to mind.

Why is EVE's sentience more-or-less taken for granted...whereas Wall-E is assumed to have developed sentience, but only at some later point?
Is it because Wall-E's task--collecting and compacting garbage--is regarded as menial? (Which implies blue-collar = low intelligence.) Granted, EVE's task may be regarded as more important: but only from the perspective of task-per-robot-module. Consider the task of the entire workforce of Wall-Es (they must have existed, at one time). This was very important; without them, the Earth could never have been made inhabitable again. Nor could EVE have ever located a living plant, under all that garbage: if it hadn't been cleared away. The technology for sentient machines exists (see EVE, Auto etc.) Wall-E's job is simpler than theirs, but it would require a level of sentience beyond the abilities of today's most-sophisticated A Is. This doesn't exclude the possibility that Wall-E's capabilities have evolved. His work probably wouldn't require an AI with a self-image.
 * You're finishing up by supporting the position you began by arguing against (nominally, anyway)
 * And you're exploring issues which have already been tackled in the previous entry, in a much more entertaining way.
 * Hey! This is WMG. Gimme some leeway.
 * What do you want, a protagonist without Character Development?
 * Doesn't sentience imply a sense of self?
 * From an AI perspective, this is a complicated question. Some tasks are extremely difficult to put into software, though to the layman they may seem simple. Examples would be devices which have "problem-solving" or "learning" abilities. By today's standards, these might be advanced AI issues: ones which we're capable of implementing--at a low level (relative to what a human mind can do)--without coming anywhere near the extremely difficult task of programming a computer to be fully intelligent.

In the new society at the end of the movie, robots are treated equal to humans.
This troper found it funny how despite being bored, spoilt and terminally lazy, the inhabitants of the Axiom as a whole seem to be rather good-natured, and quick to refer to WALL-E as 'that guy' rather than 'that robot'. Since they haven't been paying attention to robots for centuries, and by the time they notice them they've become ridiculously human, quite possibly they don't see any reason not to treat the robots with the respect they'd give any other human. The robots seem to fade out of the picture in the end sequence, but one is seen alongside a human as they try to catch fish with a net. Possibly while the humans are busy rediscovering culture and civilisation, and bringing life back to Earth, the robots are helping them but also continuing to explore their own humanity. Who says you can't get away with Happily Ever After anymore?
 * Why are the humans on Axiom mostly good-natured? I think it's because they've gone generations without being forced to spend a significant portion of their lives locked into performing dull tasks, competing for (perhaps artificially) scarce resources, and vying to survive amidst cutthroat office politics. Uh...no, I don't think I'm carrying any "baggage"...what exactly do you mean?

Underneath all that flab, the humans are in peak physical condition.
After an entire lifetime spent in low gravity without seemingly using their leg muscles at all, they shouldn't be able to walk off the Axiom, especially considering the amount of flab they'd need to carry. Heck, it's surprising they haven't all died from heart disease. Unless the original planned five-year cruise catered for the effects of years in space, and featured an artificial health regimen, sort of like those electrical-stimulus "Work your abs while you sleep!" devices except not total rubbish. This kept their muscles and cardiovascular systems in good shape despite their increasingly atrocious body mass index.
 * So all the humans are like Sumo wrestlers (or Kingpin)?
 * Very likely, in all seriousness. The captain manages to hold on to AUTO when it's flailing around wildly, even with one arm, and the dates for the different captains show them living progressively longer lives.
 * This could tie into the Designer Babies thing on the main page: Eventually the humans stopped reproducing on their own, so AUTO would've had to take things into his own spokes, so to speak. In doing so, he would've probably tweaked human genetics so they'd live healthy and long lives even with the lifestyle they were forced to lead. This could either help them out or screw them over on Earth.
 * They live twice as long as modern humans do, so this theory is a go.
 * AUTO directives probably force him to take care of humans the best way possible, Earth colonization is not a option, but there might come a time where the humans would need to defend themselves, so he keeps them in a "good" condition that works for both keep them controlled (and less likely to risk themselves), but also that would allow them to face problems and emergencies.

WALL-E is R.O.B.
After the Earth's clean-up was finally finished, WALL-E didn't need to be a trash compactor anymore. The Axiom's scientists swapped out WALL-E's trash-compactor torso for a sleeker model, improved the power of his laser, and replaced his treads with thrusters. They gave the same treatment to the other WALL-E models, and changed his acronym, since he is no longer a waste allocation robot. Many years later, WALL-E lives on a floating island (courtesy of the Axiom's tech) with his fellow WALL-E units. This explains why we can have two similar looking robots that are so painfully woobieish. The reason why he ended up doing what wanted is simple. He took EVE hostage.
 * Because EVE is never seen in the game, it means that she was held in Subspace... which was essentially erased from existance. Shortly after the ending of the game, WALL-E/R.O.B., realising that all the other robots are gone and there's no reason for him to continue existing, starts a fighting tournament in which he will eventually be destroyed. This tournament is, essentially, all normal Smash Bros. gameplay.
 * Alternatively, when Ganondorf shows up to control all of the other R.O.B.s, he makes an offhand comment about EVE being destroyed for scrap. This is why WALL-E/R.O.B. has to be carried off the island -- he cannot comprehend a world without her, so simply becomes catatonic... but then decides to avenge EVE by destroying Tabuu. This then leads to the conclusion of the above theory.

The world has become like this because it was the aftermath of Osamu Tezuka's "Metropolis"
The ending of Metropolis is eerily similar to the setting of WALL-E. Humans have left in a space ship, robots are left on Earth and the planet is a dump.

WALL-E is a retelling of Doctor Who
WALL-E is The Doctor, EVE is his companion, Hal the cockroach is Jack Harness the Immortal, and AUTO is The Master.
 * Too simple. A better guess would be that it's the American version of Starship UK. The Brits get a Space Whale, the Yanks channel Wal Mart and Virgin Galactic.

Someone ships HAN-S/M-O
... what? Don't look at me like that! Better than AUTO WALL-E Foe Yay.

AUTO Pilot is the descendant of, or mutated form of, OTTO Pilot from Airplane!!
Exactly What It Says on the Tin. At the very end of Airplane! We see, having gotten a taste for humanity, a taste for control, a taste for... .

Alternately, Airplane! is WALL-E from AUTO/OTTO's point of view.

The animals and plants were in storage on another Axiom-class ship
Like in Titan A.E. or Trigun.

Eve's initial trigger-happiness is due to extreme frustration
Due to a programming error, she's the only EVE unit ever sent to the annual investigation of Earth, while the others remain in permanent stasis. Thus she's had to endure centuries of constant failure, becoming increasingly more snappy and irritable. She remains vaguely hopeful at the start of every mission (thus her little flightshow), but subconsciously fears (quite rightfully) another futile trip. Thus, as she first time encounters something moving on the surface, having landed in a different location every time, she promptly throws all her frustrations at it - namely Wall-E by attempting to blast it into bits. Wall-E might have ended up just as grouchy if he hadn't invented his collecting hobby and found the video and music clips to keep himself entertained.

Eve's trigger happiness is due to sexual frustration.
Note that it goes away once her and Wall-E... get to know each other.

WALL-E is the future of The Incredibles, or a possible future of it.
EVE and GO-4 have Syndrome's forcefield thingies, and he did say he was going to commercialize the designs... Maybe his successor did?
 * Not to mention the electronic voices of the pool robot and help kiosk being exactly the same as the sentry bird and Manta plane on Nomanisan.
 * This would actually be an interesting way to reconcile the objectivist themes of the Incredibles and the anti-corporate themes of Wall-E. After the events of the Incredibles, people began seeing the power of the individual and Ayn Rand made a come back. Because of this, more political decisions were made to favor corporations and things like anti-trust laws and environmental regulations fell by the wayside. This directly leads to the rise of Buy N Large which, as we saw in Wall-E, totally ruins the planet.

Buy N Large used to be Geneco
After  took over, it was expanded into a company that provided everything the ailing planet needed, not just organs. A few generations later (with a new CEO), the organ failure crisis got worse and it was blamed on the level of pollution, which had skyrocketed. By sending up the spaceships, Geneco got what it had always wanted: control over the entire human population.

Of course, the Earth they left behind still looked rather similar, with Big Brother-ish TV screen advertisements for the all-powerful corporation everywhere.

WALL-E has Mystic Eyes
The Mystic Eyes of Woobiness! Truly, one of the most powerful of them all!

Buy N Large was taken over by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
They wanted to see what made their robots tick, and used them for their Genuine People Personality Project. Of course, Marvin was based on Wall-E's programming, and he's so depressed because there is only one EVE.

EVE's voice-synthesizing is running on something similar to the Vocaloid software
Even though she doesn't speak much, her voice is pretty human-like and she was shown to be able to pronounce new words that she hadn't had in her Vocabulary before (because it wouldn't have made much sense for her to have a broad vocabulary) like when she learned Wall-E's name. Then, why didn't she ever speak in full sentences, not even to calm down the humans? Because it's difficult to make spoken text not sound like Creepy Monotone with these programs. (Yeah, you heard right, singing is easy, but speaking sounds creepy.) Eve needed a few tries to get Wall-E's name in the right pronunciation and pitch. Doing that for long junks of text would probably take up to much time. Since, given her personality, she probably didn't want to sound like a soulless Terminatrix, she just avoided talking altogether.
 * Alternative theory: EVE is Miku Hatsune. No clue how that works though...
 * EVE is Rin Because why not?

WALL-E is a prequel to Futurama
Explains the Anachronism Stew involving much of the culture and technology, how Old New York became abandoned, and why all the robots have personalities and genders. All the famous heads in jars were stored somewhere on the Axiom.
 * What about the D & D-esque Uberwald that rises and is later razed by War of the Worlds-style aliens? The end credits show the city going from scrapyard to San Francisco... unless Wall-E's city isn't New York...
 * Don't you remember? Bender destroys it after being chased by Sweedish police.
 * Also explains why they now have a mental institution for Criminally Insane Robots.

WALL-E is the distant future of Brave New World
Considering how obsessed that society was with happiness and extreme consumerism, they used up the world eventually and had to leave. Also somewhere between those two points in time, robots were developed and eliminated the need for lower caste humans.
 * Also explains how there can be babies in the future, when mankind is way too fat to reproduce.
 * Problem: In Brave New World, they quite explicitly say they had the capability of automating the jobs of 95% of humanity but didn't because people got restless if they didn't provide them with some kind of "work". I mean, they have a genetically-engineered simpleton operating the elevator, for heaven's sake. We can and do already automate that.
 * And today, at Wal-Mart and other major retailers, we have greeters. Granted, they weren't genetically-engineered to be capable of little else...

Pizza plants exist
The Captain isn't confused. BnL genetically engineered actual pizza plants.

WALL-E represents industrial technology, EVE is patterned after commercial technology.
WALL-E is strongly built, easy to repair and modify, utilitarian and not designed with aesthetics in mind (despite being cute). EVE is sleek and postmodern, packed with all kinds of gadgets and features (plasma cannon, hover ability) even if they're not really necessary for her function. A forklift and an iPod. Of course, neither of these are portrayed as a bad thing- WALL-E can achieve much despite his simplicity, and EVE makes the most of everything she can do.

WALL-E is a prequel to The Matrix
The people had a hard time accepting the robots as sentient beings, and continued seeing them as an underclass. Eventually the robots demanded equal rights, rebelled and founded their own nation. The humans refused accepting them, started a war which they lost, and we all know what happened then.

Alternatively, WALL-E is a sequel to The Matrix
The ships left Earth during the events of Second Rennaisance, after it was clear the war wasn't going to end well for humans. They return after the events in Revolutions and help make the Earth's surface viable again.

WALL-E is the son of the garbage machine in Monster's Inc.
Seriously, they're both things that take garbage and turn it into cubes of garbage.

The WALL-Es were programmed to automatically plant seeds in their tracks after digging the trash down to soil.
This explains how the BNL people could expect plants to grow spontaneously after hundreds of years of dust storms and polluted soil. They stockpiled a huge amount of plant seeds, and set it so that the WALL-Es would plant a portion of the seeds allotted to them once they found soil. If the soil was usable, the seeds would grow for the EVEs to find. After a WALL-E used up all of the seeds it was set to plant, it deactivated. This explains why all of the WALL-E units except the sentient one were inactive (aside from the possibility that they were all sentient, and died, which would be sad), because WALL-E went from programmed actions to assuming his directive was whatever he had been doing in the first place (garbage control), as well as why the hill was covered in live plants: A WALL-E nearby had planted the seeds on the hill and in the boot in the refrigerator, and a dust storm blew the refrigerator door shut after the plant had grown some and the planting WALL-E went away and deactivated itself. WALL-E's interest in the plant was a vague memory of his mostly-overwritten secondary programming. The WALL-Es that found dirt and planted seeds sent a signal out to the ship so the EVE probes could be dropped in roughly the right area without wasting resources sending them all over the planet every few years.

WALL-E takes place in the same universe as Fallout.
Think about it: the hellish, dust-storm-plagued wasteland, the tattered remnants of civilization, the complete lack of green and growing things, the barely-habitable conditions... it all seems oddly familiar, doesn't it? Furthermore it's been hinted in the Fallout games that the American government was in fact trying to find a way to get its "essential" people off the planet before everything went to hell, and the Vaults were only a coverup to appease the rest of the population (in addition to giant controlled experiments). The media used in the movie is also in keeping with the 1950s "feel". I predict that shortly after the movie's ending, all the passengers of the Axiom are devoured by Radscorpions. MUAHAHAHA.
 * However! It's safe to say that the city WALL-E was living in had to have been a major American city, and we know that parts of the US have been reclaimed by human settlements. Some are violent, but some are willing to work with other settlements to rebuild humanity, especially if the newcomers have valuable technology to aid in the effort. While the humans would be vulnerable to outside aggression, they're also accompanied by robots and a ship that undoubtedly has weapons, as EVE does, not to mention the considerable armor of the ship to protect them until walls or something go up. If that city was, for example, New York City, it's likely that they'll come into contact with the Commonwealth, who appreciate high technology and would accept the humans in return for getting the jump on the tech, although their attitudes towards sentient robots might cause friction. The Radscorpions would have shown up at some point during the credits, since it covers an exceptionally long period of time (as evinced by the plant's sprout becoming a huge tree). I propose that the Axiom came down somewhere near Oasis, perhaps carving a wider ravine, and the Oasis denizens taught the Axiom crew how to survive the Wasteland, while the Axiom's tech (and helpful robots) spread the greenery of Harold, resulting in all the meadows and such we see in the last part of the credits. The only problem might be that the humans from the ship might have to adjust to the residual radiation of the Wasteland, but that's about it.

The dust storms are from Axiom-class ships landing.
They've been returning for years. Or weeks. But Rule of Drama.
 * There must've been some thinning of gravity for a giant dust storm to blow from wherever they landed all the way to WALL-E's city.
 * Butterfly effect. Storms can go thousands of miles in Real Life. And the storms could have been picking up dust the whole way, with no plants to keep the soil anchored. Also, we don't actually know how far away they landed, maybe just over the horizon.

Buy N Large engineers have way too much funding and way too much time on their hands.
And that's why they create robots with seemingly unnecessary features and products that last forever.

The reason EVE is so well-armed and trigger-happy... is WALL-E.
...or rather, the WALL-Es. The EVE units were meant to go find plants on Earth BUT Earth was full of progressively malfunctioning WALL-E units. It's plausible that some of these malfunctioning WALL-Es might even become violent. Hence the need for the EV Es to be able to take care of themselves and be on the lookout for trouble. It's just lucky for everyone involved that they weren't simply programmed to destroy any WALL-E on sight.

The receptionist robot on the elevator to the Captain sings "still alive" when she thinks nobody is looking

 * The fact that the elevators are like the ones in portal... doesn't help.

M-O becomes a Monk-like Detective
Upon reaching Earth, M-O is still extremely neurotic without any way to deal with his OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Directive). So instead of having to be brutally reprogrammed, he chooses to adapt to his environment, solving crimes as an outlet. By utilizing his cleaning infrared camera to detect evidence he becomes M-ONK, world renowned detective bot.
 * Er... Master Of Nitpicking Knowledge...?
 * Meh, It's a gift...and a curse.

The Programming Of The Robots Is Highly Susceptible To Viruses
Especially if that virus includes the alteration of their behaviors. The bot that WALL-E waves at the first time he is headed for the bridge first practices the motion, and then uses it effectively when he sees WALL-E leaving. And later on, the bots in the ship's garbage dump are seen waving at WALL-E, despite the fact that WALL-E never waved at them. This means that either the robots of the ship have spread the "waving behavior" through their actions, and passed it on that way, or it was disseminated through some sort of internal code. Either way, it spread, virus-like, through the whole of the ship's robot population in a matter of hours.
 * I wouldn't say that their program is susceptible to viruses, but they can be easily over ridden.

All the robots are built with an Apple interface.
WALL-E makes the Apple Chime and EVE looks so similar to an iPod that it's almost a design infringement. So its more than possible that all of the robots are built with a Mac computer. Plus it's more than likely Windows has become extinct.
 * Which means BnL has consumed Apple.
 * Actually, Steve Jobs got Apple's lead product designer to go down to Pixar and help with EVE's design. Seriously.
 * And AUTO uses MAC OS Machine Talk as his voice...

EVE's design was also inspired by Rayman
In response to the WMG above, if Rayman and the iPod were to have a baby, it would be EVE.

The "magical" hats in Presto were built from the same technology as the doors in Monsters Inc.
This troper was half expecting Sulley to pop out at any minute from one of the hats.
 * Which is also the same technology found in the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device.

The overweight, tubby humans were deliberately bred to be that way as part of AUTO's directive.
As was pointed out somewhere above, a human future where everything is scientifically possibly wouldn't result in egg-shaped humans; that technology would go into making it easier to be fit and good-looking without actually working at it. It doesn't matter if, over the generations, it became easier to be fat: Standards of beauty, especially in the modern day, are hard to dispel. Plus, BnL would know that there's much more money to be made in diet treatments and surgeries to make you youthful-looking than in just encouraging the humans to be fat. So, if there's no real reason for the future-humans to look like pears, why did they?

Clearly, part of AUTO's directive was to carefully pare away the human instinct for creativity and action, since trying to control such a large group of people is like herding cats. So the food was increased to make them rotund, and slowly the treatments that kept them fit were replaced by heavy foods that made them lethargic. At this point, the original motive of Buy'N'Large wouldn't count, since the company would have been destroyed along with Earth. Distracted by games and virtual activities which required little to no movement, the humans failed to notice their degradation even as it stared them in the face (as in the line of Captains' portraits). This succeeded for a long time, because no-one could take the trouble to walk off the marked lines, and no-one even thought of doing so.

WALL-E is the past of Battle Angel Alita/Gunnm
Alita takes place on a junked earth filled with humans and cyborgs. In the sky looms Jeru and Salem, filled with both of the above as well as sentient yet goofy robots. Additionally, Salem is in contact with the Venusians, who modified themselves into "Humpty Dumpty" forms and get around on hoverchairs, their arms and legs nearly useless and their faces taking up about 95% of their bodymass. Clearly, the Venusians were on a starliner that didn't return to earth but continued to evolve/mutate. The leader of Salem's robots, Landa Namnam, claims that a human gave them knowledge, but all he did was show them the information -- the robots were already intelligent. Jeru is the remnent of the Axiom, filled with the people who weren't ready to leave the ship and continued their blissfully wasteful ways and using nanotechnology to become slim again.

A WALL-E sequel will feature Luxo Jr. as a character
OK, so this troper really has no idea if there's ever going to be a sequel, so this is really more of a hope than a guess. But in the off chance that there is one, I think that Luxo Jr. would make an awesome addition to the cast. Him and WALL-E already have a great rapport together (what with Luxo's bulb being replaced by WALL-E, and WALL-E joining him to form PIXAR), so how cool would it be to have them in the same film? Plus, I think it would be awesome just to see both of them again.

WALL-E is the future of the world seen in Jennifer Government
The two mega-corporations, US Alliance and Team Advantage, eventually merge, becoming the Buy-n-Large corporation. In the face of such economic power, the Government wilts and disappears. With no Government oversight, BnL trashes the planet, and takes all of it's happiest consumers to space, leaving the WALL-Es behind mainly as a token and to pander to the investors.

WALL-E is Pixar's gift to the world of fiction
Single source that can fill in all plot hole and give continuity. The evidence? Read this page!

The scout ship took a long while to get to the Axiom.
The scout ship didn't have a hyperdrive, so it must have traveled at below the speed of light to get to the Axiom. The long travel time, both going to Earth and coming back, explains why no humans were aboard (they would have died of old age, if boredom didn't kill them first). Thus, the early scenes of Wall-E on Earth was much less then 500 years since the launch of the Axiom.
 * Only problem with that theory is that Wall-E's pet roach was still alive when he came back. I'd be willing to believe several months passed, though.
 * The screenplay points out "weeks" passing with WALL-E on the back of the ship, so while it didn't take YEARS, he wasn't there for a few hours either.

The Axiom was parked over a large gravitational body
When AUTO realized he was expected to keep humanity on the ship indefinitely, he had to find some way to deal with the problems of micro-gravity on the human body. Note that the message from the BnL CEO clearly shows that he expected the human-ball-of-dough effect to occur within the original span of the Axiom's mission, instead of the generations where it did occur. Auto found a suitable source of external gravity and put itself over the object to keep the Axiom positioned so the body could produce a close to 1-Earth G field on the Axiom. It kept the thrusters firing on a rotating pattern, so that at least one set of thrusters was on at any given moment. This explains why everyone was aboard when the ship 'tilted', since AUTO had changed the ship's angle to the gravitational source.
 * I really want to say You Fail Physics Forever. I really do. But since we're discussing a film where it's apparent the creators do (or at least ignored it for drama)...

WALL-E takes place in the same universe as 2012.
Except the Arks really were spaceships.

WALL-E's personality is the result of his surviving a robot plague.
This'll take a while. Stick with me.

Imagine you're planning Operations Cleanup and Recolonisation. The plan is to find viable vegetation within five years. This is a daunting prospect considering how slowly the EVE units cover ground; after all, the operation ran for seven hundred years before a unit got around to WALL-E's general area (judging from WALL-E's reaction, he'd never seen one before). Not to mention the fact that you presumably couldn't expect a positive result before at least two or three years worth of cleanup had taken place.

So how do you speed the process along? Well, what about the cleanup robots themselves? They were going to be out there scouring the planet anyway; why not program them to be able to make a simple visual recognition of plant life? Then if they ever stumbled upon some, they could send word to the Axiom, and an EVE unit could be dispatched for confirmation. Of course, this requires the WALL-E units to be rigged to broadcast into/receive from deep space, but that's okay, you only have to do this with one unit; the rest could have simple short-range communication between them (which you'd already want anyway to help coordinate their cleanup efforts), so even if the "leader" unit didn't personally unearth a plant, it would promptly know about any that were found, and report accordingly.

Now skip ahead a bit. You're the guy running the WALL-E program. You're clearly very technically minded, and know the WALL-E units' software, their communications, et cetera. And one day it occurs to you: people throw out things that are worth money every day. A smart dumpster diver can make their entire living selling what they find in the trash, be it functional yet obsolete electronics, cosmetically flawed clothing, blackmailable information or what-have-you. And here you are with an army of trash collecting robots at your disposal, and all the garbage in the world to search through. So what if you tweak the programming a little? They can already discern different types of garbage, at least to the degree of what is plant matter and what isn't; it shouldn't be too difficult to tell them to search and sort as they go, and send back reports of the loot they discover.

So you write a new program for the WALL-E units and transmit it to the leader unit on Earth. But you're not quite the master programmer you thought you were. As the leader unit receives the program and passes it along to the other units as instructed, its software is badly corrupted and it crashes in short order. The same fate befalls the other units in quick succession. (Notice that the dead units are all clustered in the one area, with their parts in good enough condition for WALL-E to use as spares; very much as though, rather than wearing out, they were killed off by some kind of calamity.)

But one fortunate side-effect of the program's corrupting effect is that the program itself is corrupted in transmission. By the time it reaches the last unit -- WALL-E -- it's been altered enough, like an electronic game of telephone, that it no longer causes a systems crash. It still causes major behavioural changes, however. It does partially work, as WALL-E now sorts garbage into "crush" and "keep" piles, but he has no sense of monetary value (deciding, for example, that a diamond ring is worth less than the box it came in), and only keeps what captures his own eccentric interest. He's also, unfortunately enough, lost the ability to recognise a plant when he sees one.

Meanwhile the programmer doesn't want the failure of Operation Cleanup to be too closely examined, lest his hand in it be discovered. He makes up some cover story and insists the whole thing should be abandoned. WALL-E is left to his own devices for seven hundred years.

In that time, WALL-E continues to record a thorough history of his collecting efforts, ready to transmit it on as instructed, only with nobody to transmit to. Over time his transceiver weakens dramatically; since he doesn't use it, he doesn't notice its degradation and fails to replace it.

Eventually comes a time when his weak-ass transceiver is physically close enough to another robot to establish a connection: when he and EVE are dancing in space. The spark we see represents seven centuries worth of accumulated memories being transmitted from WALL-E to EVE...but of course, it's just meaningless code as far as EVE's operating system is concerned, and (considering the advance of technology) probably such a comparatively small packet of data that it just sits there unnoticed.

Then at the end of the movie, WALL-E is badly damaged and needs a great deal of his hardware replaced. In the process, his memory is wiped; he goes, essentially, back to factory settings. That is, until EVE once again gets close enough to establish a connection, at which point all his old data jumps back in, restoring his memories up as far as the space-dancing.

Or, you know, maybe it was The Power of Love. Whatever.
 * This was great fun to think through . . . and it fits with most of the earth-based parts of the movie.

WALL-E takes place in the same universe as One Piece.
BnL didn't have to go around buying a ton of small governments; there was already one World Government that was easily overthrown because of their already crumbling state. This also explains the nautical influence of the cruseliners, why all the robots are designed so cutely, and why everybody speaks the same language.

M-O has a detective monologue running in his head.
Imagine an ultra-serious film noir monologue in the same vein as Watchmen. "The world will look up and shout, 'clean us.' And I'll say 'whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa' and get to work." Or something like that.

The other EVE units will try to hit on Wall-E.
Mostly because I keep imagining the result would be hilarious. Wall-E's deeply confused at his newfound popularity with the ladybots and there's an inevitable apocalyptic showdown between his EVE and the other EV Es. Of course, true love will persist, but it would be a fun ride.

There are quite a few people already living on Earth.
Even if we take the optimistic view and assume that the Buy 'n Large (and any governments not Buy 'n Large subsidiaries) built enough ships for everyone who wanted to leave, there are still going to be a lot of people that are going to dislike the notion of heading off into space for an indefinite length of time.

'You ain't gettin' me up in one of those things!' 'Texas forever!' 'I've lived all my life on this active volcano, and by gum, I'm going to die here!" 'BUY 'N LARGE IS GOING TO SELL US TO THE ALIENS!!!!'

Also, to sustain a large population in luxury for centuries, IN SPACE, requires the use of Applied Phlebotinum applied to recycling and energy sources, so the technology should be available for people remaining on earth. And if you can survive in space for centuries, you can certainly survive on a perfectly good planet whose only real problem is that the air is unbreathable. (The ominipresent garbage? Raw materials). So, there probably are other people living on Earth, most likely underground, because it's easier (and safer) to seal off a tunnel than to build a giant air-dome.

Why hasn't anyone run into WALL-E? Well,
 * 1. They have a controlled population, like the crew of the Axiom. They aren't swarming all over the place.
 * 2. They already came, and took all the good/interesting stuff in the first couple centuries after the disaster, while WALL-E was still non-sentient. (Why do you think he's only got the one video?)
 * 3. Or perhaps after living underground for centuries, they just aren't that interested in the surface of the planet anymore.


 * So, Wall-E world is in the same continuity as City of Ember. I love you.
 * Sounds more like The Time Machine. Eloi and Morlocs?

The real reason there was an evacuation was because The Combine were coming.
BnL didn't want to panic the people when they found out that the combine were coming to destroy the entire place and only had 7 hours, so they said "Hey, there's a lot of garbage! We better go out into space!" and got out their space cruise ships which they made for a rainy day and ran like hell. Black Mesa and Aperture Science were two sections of BnL had, and one of them had to go since they were wasting money. That explains the rivalry.

So, basically, one problem. America was affected by the Seven hour war, you say. Well, I have an answer. They saw it coming. They got the warning and skipped off in their space ships while those who couldn't afford going out to space or were basically bait, were slaughtered by the Combine.

The "Two hundred years passed" thing? Wall-e's and the ship's clock were damaged badly during the attack, so they couldn't tell what time it was. Somewhere, in eastern Europe, Gorden Freeman is slaughtering the Combine and seeing something drop from the sky, and shrugs.

WALL-E takes place in the same continuity as Treasure Planet
One ship in the Buy 'n' Large fleet that carried both humans and various animals that left Earth got thrown off-course during the "Five Year Cruise" and came across the Etherium. (This ship was modeled after old wooden ships of the eighteenth century to appeal to romantics, I suppose) Those aboard discovered by chance that there was breathable air and were somehow split into several groups that each landed on different planets in the system. One of those groups landed on an inhabited mining planet known as Montressor. And so to start a life on the new environment, those that weren't making a living working in the mines were to provide shelter for others for a fee. (Which was how the Benbow Inn got started) Over time as the humans in-bred, their numbers dwindled to the point where the only human family left on Montressor was the Hawkins family. ..

WALL-E and The Road take place in the same universe.
While the unknown catastrophe is taking place, the rich escape on spaceships, and the rest of the population is left to slowly dwindle and die, like the father and the son. EVE finally returns after the remainder of the human race is wiped out.

The Power of Love just helped reboot WALL-E's system.
When WALL-E was disabled by being crushed under the holo-detector (among all those other things), it wasn't a proper shut-down. It was the equivalent of something considerably worse than just yanking your computer's plug out of the wall. Then, when EVE repaired him, all she did was cram components back into place and get the electricity flowing again. That wasn't enough to cause an actual full system boot. WALL-E's primary directive and everything related to it were woken up, but nothing in his long-term memory. However! Being "kissed" by EVE includes an electric jolt that causes a system halt... and the resulting automatic reboot. This time, all systems initialise properly, including his long-term memory and all the "quirks" he had picked up.

WALL-E and EVE are reincarnations of Milo and Kida.
Let's compare: WALL-E and Milo are Collectors Of The Strange who wear Nerd Glasses and yellow "clothes". Around the time they find themselves in a new world, they meet Action Girls EVE and Kida, white-haired blue-eyed glowy "tattooed" warrior women out to protect their people from impending doom.
 * You could also argue they're some sort of incarnation of Sully and Neytiri (he has wheels and can't leave the ground, she can fly; he's from a crapsack world, she can glow, etc), minus the nerdiness.
 * Or you couldn't, because aside from being less-fitting the analogy would link the CMoA to a... decidedly less universally-beloved property.

WALL-E is intended to represent PC's while EVE is meant to represent Macs
I know that WALL-E has the apple "start up" noise and is acutally modled after one of the older apple computers, but his versatility, adaptability, and functionality as well as his ablility to easily swap parts in and out as needed and customise for a given situation clearly marks him as either a very early version of Apple and/or almost any modern PC out there today. EVE on the other hand is very much a precision machine designed to do a specific job and look fantastic while doing it. She needs an entire robot dedicated just for her maintainence, and takes a long time to "hack" her out of her pre-programed responses, and when it is done she's regarded by her masters/creators as broken and must go though a labor intensive "repair" process, and can even be locked down by them, allowing no user access. The whole point of the story is that Macs and PC users can get along.
 * ...Thank you.

This isn't the first time an EVE probe came back positive
True, the Captain said that no probe came back positive before, but given the lengths AUTO went to ensure that the A113 Over-ride remained in effect, it would not be surprising if at least one of the past probes found a plant during the tenure of one of his predcessors. Maybe even multiple times during a tenure.

The garbage disaster also had a biological componant
It's the same question raised about the Prawn weapons portrayed in District 9. Seriously, why would a simple exploration and retrieval probe (like the rovers that have been sent to Mars and the like) need military firepower of that magnitude? Something that could be used to remove debris or obsticals would make sense, but something that could potentially wipe out fleets of warships?

Clearly, something was expected to be roaming the surface. With all the trash left on Earth, it wouldn't be surprising if legally questionable Industrial Waste or genetic experients were tossed out into the environment and possably into the food web. This would've lead to vicious, and highly agressive monster versions of the wildlife, and with an indefinite timeperiod inbetween launch and the start of the movie, it's possable that evolution would've gone into overdrive.

Besides, given the state of the Address Podium set during the Final Message from Forthright, something was going down.

Hello Dolly is the only reason Wall-E acts the way he does
Since Wall-E likely had rare human interaction even in his earliest years, the only way he could pick up a consistent set of behavior protocols was by watching a movie over and over again. Hello Dolly imprinted on him his Nice Guy, Innocent personality. But had he found a tape of any other film or genre, he would've been vastly different.


 * A Western: He's a gun-slinger wannabe Sherif.
 * A Horror Movie: Hopefully he would be the Survivor Character. Because if he imprinted on the killer...
 * And If he found Army of Darkness, Wall-E would've been a Badass, and instead of Put On Your Sunday Clothes and It Only Takes A Moment, he would play sound bites of Ash. And EVE would've been very much hot an' bothered.
 * There must be fanart of this!
 * Oh god... what if WALL-E found a porno?
 * Probably this. Either that of become a Pornomancer.'
 * That depends. American, German, Swedish, or Japanese?
 * Thank you, porn geographer. By dint of my own diseased mind I ask you imagine what might happen if Wall-E imprinted on Azumanga Daioh. 'Compacting is so fun/ Compacting is so fun/ Now it's time to press a cube and see what we have done!'

WALL-E is a propoganda film made by Buy N Large
There's a garbage problem. The plan: send the entire population of Earth into space, and leave behind a bunch of cute little robots to clean things up. Good plan? Terrible plan, as evidenced by the events of the movie. BNL saw this coming and decided to just sit there and set up a giant Masquerade to convince everyone they were in space. 700 years later, it was safe to go back to the way life used to be. They did. But some people became suspicious many years later, and BNL, fearing a rebellion, made WALL-E.

WALL-E, Astro Boy (the 2009 Westernised remake), and The Matrix take place in the same universe
The similarities between the world at the end of WALL-E and that at the beginning of Astro Boy (2009) are striking, so the connection is easy to make. After the events of WALL-E, the humans attempt to clean up all the garbage and revitalise the planet, but ultimately fail and become frustrated. The Axiom is progressively restructured and enhanced into a large, high-tech city, and is eventually renamed Metro City. The garbage on the surface is still there; the robots are still humanity’s “servants”; and there are still some wacko-misfit robots, who at some point form the Robot Revolutionary Front.

The end of Astro Boy (2009) sees humanity granting the robots the rights to individual freedom and self-determination. Although this fulfills the RRF’s primary goal, revolutionaries are never happy; the RRF’s successor organisation runs berserk and demands superiority over biological life. A man-vs.-machine war ensues, leading to the events of The Matrix. Since the machines now have complete control over the planet, it is easy to argue that they destroy all human historical records and technology, which explains how people like Morpheus can be completely clueless as to what year it really is and what all the pre-history was.

"WALL-E" is the distant past of Fireball.
Wall-e, Eve and all the other robots are treated as equals to humans after demonstrating their human personalities and saving the axiom. This allowed the robots to become self-sufficient and independant from humans as they rebuilt their society on earth. Naturally, having different needs and "cultures", robot and human citizens eventually seperated themselves from each other. In seperation, robots and humans grew prejudiced towards each other, eventually leading to a war that forced humanity out of the city that they restored and into the surrounding deserted area.

The Wall-e and Eve are treated as royalty among robots for their part in making humans recognize them as people. While Wall-e unsuccessfully spent 20000 years trying to end the war between the surviving humans and the robots, Wall-e and Eve's "Children," Drossel and Gedachtnis are built. Drossel to be the successor to Wall-e and Eve's royal status, and Gedachtnis to be her caretaker.

This explains their similar color schemes and to a lesser extent their personalities, the "desert" explained in episode 4 of Fireball and the reason Drossel's father, Wall-e, wanted so much to end the war (as is mentioned in episode 7).

WALL-E is the modern version of Fallout.
Fallout is based on the 50s vision of the future, when everyone was scared of atomic war. WALL-E is set in the modern vision of the future, AKA, pollution. Rather than the vaults, based on Fallout shelters of the time, it has space ships. Earth is still the wasteland.

WALL-E is a retelling of Operation Snake Eater.
WALL-E is a stand-in Big Boss, so is EVE for EVA, AUTO for Volgin, M-O for Ocelot, and GO-4 for Raikov.

This movie is an unofficial "prequel" to Mother 3.
The backstory of Mother 3 involves the end of the world occuring, and only a small amount of humans and animals are able to survive by taking a "white ship" to the Nowhere Islands, which is still habitable due to a magical dragon slumbering beneath it. The white ship is, of course, the Axiom (this means that not ALL humans made it to the cruise and some were sadly left behind), and the reason that humanity spends 700 years there without finding out that Earth is still habitable is because they don't send a probe to the Nowhere Island until Wall-E gives EVE the plant. Wall-E had already been living on the Nowhere Island, which could explain why he is presumably the only Wall-E left active. Anyway, after the humans come back to Earth, their memories are erased because of their wish to not harm the Earth anymore with technology, the robots all find some place separate from humans to live, and the society of the Nowhere Islands and Tazmily village as seen in Mother 3 is set up, and within a few generations, people learn how to stay in shape.
 * ...This makes so much sense it's scary.

The events of WALL-E have happened several times
Imagine the epilogue to this movie:
 * The humans, having spent their lives in hoverchairs, have a hard time coping with normal gravty.
 * They also find that there's nothing to eat; their crops get destroyed by cockroaches and dust storms.
 * Thus, they leave Earth and wait for the atmosphere to recover naturally, leaving a few robots behind to build garbage into cties.
 * AUTO is reactivated so that the ship can survive; the EVE robots are therefore sent back, as AUTO does not know how to stop sending the probes.
 * The first EVE to find Earth finds a plastic plant (how else could a plant survive that long?) and one of the robots left behind tags along back to the Axiom
 * The occupants rebel against AUTO and shoot themselves back at Earth- AUTO, being unable to learn or do anything but comply to BNL transmissions, fails to stop them, and never realizes that resisting disconnection is futile.
 * The humans land on Earth, and try to reverse engineer the robot that convinced them to head back to Earth.
 * They leave once again, leaving behind nothing but their reverse-engineered WALL-Es

Each time the poorly educated humans try to reverse engineer the robots, they steadily get worse, and they all die, save for one or two, until an EVE robot returns. There never was a BNL plan to pick up the trash, they just decided to send the company out into space for a few centuries while the Earth cleans itself up. The WALL-Es are the product of the first landing of The Axiom, which explans why they are more susceptible to quirks than the ship's robots, and why they have eyes that look like binoculars rather than glowing pixels on a computer screen.

Mo is the real hero of this story
He tries throughout the film to thwart EVE's and Walle's evil plot to introduce deadly bacteria to which the crew of the Axiom have no immunities. John and the Captain were doomed the moment they touched WALL-E. Mo did all the could to contain the spread of contaminants until he finally met up with them in the trash dump when he was finally able to sanitize Walle and prevent him from waging biological warfare on the Axiom. Unfortunately, Walle and Eve had a back up plan. Instead of bringing the germs to the Axiom, bring the Axiom to the germs. Mo failed in his mission and soon everyone will die from the common cold.

The Axiom was reverse engineered from another ship. The Arc-Gurren.
Take a good hard look at the two ships, they do look VERY similar.

EVE was originally designed for warfare
EVE has an absurdly powerful laser cannon and it is rather Trigger Happy. However, it's a scout droid. If it was intended to be a scout droid, a simple-yet-powerful laser cutter would suffice for getting rid of obstacles. It was probably originally meant to be a droid used for warfare or for law enforcement, probably not having the codename of Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. When BnL realized that its control over the world made war unnecessary and impossible, it was redesigned into a scout droid. Unfortunately, cost-cutting and time-saving procedures let EVE keep its laser cannon and trigger happy nature.
 * EVE originally meant: EXTREMELY Violent Exterminator?

AUTO has killed several captains already.
Asides from the "Captain", there didn't seem to be any crew aboard and unlikely to have a system to train competent officers given the general cluelessness of the current captain.
 * Also, an old WMG stated that EVA's have returned with plants before. Captains who got a hold of it and didn't listen to AUTO had "heart attacks"
 * In a way, its possible that WALL-E saved the Captain's life by taking a jolt from AUTO, likely delaying AUTO's ability to give another jolt temporarily and allowing the Captain to wrestle AUTO down instead of dying from a "heart attack"

Time Measuring Standards have been altered.
Its possible that a robot can "officially" be recorded as having been operating for over 700 years, without dealing with issues like wear and tear (or the fact that rust would turned him and any potential replacement parts to dust long before) because time is measured differently in WALL-E's world. == AUTO can not fully override his core programing and will follow hardwired commands once inputted, HOWEVER, he can give these commands a lot of "interpretation" as long as it fits within mission parameters. ==
 * Given that the captain of the Axiom can turn "time" back on his ship to morning because he overslept, its likely that fiddling with time gauges is pretty commonly accepted/abused.
 * That is why he HAS to send out EVE regularly to check if plant life has returned, despite the fact that if an EVE returned positive, AUTO would be forced to return, and violate the last order in was given: "Just stay in space."
 * To minimize the risk that an EVE would return with plant life, Auto keeps directing the EV Es towards the crappiest, most polluted, most garbage packed place on Earth....however WALL-E has been on the job cleaning up the place, and miraculously, managed to save a plant and present it to EVE, then Hilarity Ensued.

The Earth is a lot less messed up than it looks.
During the ending, before the humans of the Axiom even had the chance to do more than take a few steps outside the ship, we can see that outside the city there are multiple plants already growing/thriving. Given that it looks like there are regular windstorms and climate change that has turned ports into drydocks, these are some damn tough plants!

The captain finds real pizza plants...
and starts planting theme. he starts making some of his own. Then every starts doing it. it soon becomes the worlds main export, and the world becomes covered in pizza.

And thus earth becomes a Pizza Planet