Companion Cube/Film
Examples of Companion Cubes in Film include:
- Toy Story is essentially what would happen if Companions Cubes were actually self-aware.
- Madagascar parodies Cast Away's Wilson with "Spaulding", another volleyball from a different manufacturer.
- Penny's teddy bear, Teddy, in The Rescuers. It even becomes a plot point in the climax.
- The Brave Little Toaster is based around this trope.
- In Monsters vs. Aliens, B.O.B. and the plate of Jello.
- Scrat's acorn gets this treatment in the third Ice Age movie. When he drops it in favor of Scratte, it "sings" a sad ballad as if it has just been dumped. At the end, Scrat leaves Scratte and runs back to his beloved nut.
- Subverting this is the entire point of Pinocchio// The title character is a wooden marionette that can walk and talk.
- In The Princess and the Frog, Ray the Firefly has fallen in love with the Evening Star, whom he calls Evangeline.
- At the start of Rango, the main character, a pet chameleon, treats the toys, fake palm, and dead bug in his cage as his friends and fellow actors.
- In Cast Away, the stranded Tom Hanks finds a Wilson volleyball and draws a face on it to give himself a companion, which he calls "Wilson." The ball was inspired by the screenwriter's experience stranding himself on a beach and discovering a volleyball that washed ashore. Wilson is basically the only justification for the main character's dialogue through most of the film.
- Lines were even written in the script for it, so Hanks would know exactly how to play those scenes.
- "WIIIIIIIILSOOOOOOOOOOOON!"
- "My name's Voit, dumbass!"
- The 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl is about a man who treats a RealDoll as a real woman.
- This also happened in Pushing Daisies (the episode "Bitter Sweets").
- ... Not unlike Mr. Universe and his LoveBot companion, Lenore, from Serenity.
- In Léon: The Professional, Léon's only friend has been a small houseplant, which he carefully waters with a squirt bottle and sets outside his windowsill each day. He says he likes the plant because it has "no roots," like him.
- In the film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, Natalie Portman's character is presented with a literal block of polished wood that her mysterious, eccentric employer calls the "Congreve Cube", which he indicates is extremely significant and powerful, although we're not sure how seriously to take anything he says. In at least one scene, we see her (skeptically) trying to talk to it as though it could understand her. It may or may not be a Magic Feather.
- In 1959's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, with Harry Belafonte's character acquiring a mannequin and dubbing it "Snodgrass".
- In the 2007 film I Am Legend, Robert Neville sets up several department-store mannequins around the video-rental shop and talks to them as if they were people to maintain some semblance of human interaction. As a sign of his degrading sanity, he begins begging a mannequin to answer him back.
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Fred, if you're real, you'd better tell me right now! If you're real, you'd better tell me RIGHT NOW! (gunshots) ...Damn it, Fred! DAMN IT! |
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- The Omega Man, an earlier adaptation of I Am Legend, Charlton Heston speaks to mannequins as well.
- Darkly subverted in Childs Play. Nobody but Andy believes that Chucky the doll is alive... at first.
- Otto, the automatic pilot—who happens to be an inflatable doll—in Airplane!! However, Otto seems to be capable of some independent action.
- Blazing Saddles. Arch villain Hedley Lamarr has a small blue rubber frog [dead link].
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Hedley Lamarr: Daddy love Froggy. Froggy love Daddy? |
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- In Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sgt. Hartman orders all of the Marines to personify their rifles with a girl's name. The rifle creed is "My rifle is my best friend. It is my life." Pvt. Lawrence/Pyle takes this a little too far and is later seen whispering to it like a lover... before he snaps and kills the Gunny and himself.
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Sweeney Todd and his razors, as demonstrated in the song "My Friends"—just about the only Companion Cube trait they don't have is individual names.
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Speak to me, friend |
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- The Really Useful Book from Mirror Mask. Whether it's actually alive or not is left a little bit vague, but it's really useful.
- There's also Valentine's flying tower, with which he apparently had an argument.
- Billy Madison: "Stop looking at me, Swan!"
- The new Star Trek movie has Scotty refer to the Enterprise as a woman.
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Scotty: I'd like to get my hands on her ample nacelles, if you'll forgive the engineering parlance! |
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- That should be an example of different trope altogether. Ships were regarded as female for centuries, a usage that has only faded out in the last twenty years. The Enterprise was referred to as "she" in the original series.
- Wait, ships aren't referred to as "she" anymore?
- That should be an example of different trope altogether. Ships were regarded as female for centuries, a usage that has only faded out in the last twenty years. The Enterprise was referred to as "she" in the original series.
- Rosebud in Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane.
- Stranger Than Fiction. Harold Crick's wristwatch.
- In The Pink Panther, a really drunk princess talks with the tiger carpet on which she's lying.
- In Scavenger Hunt, the servants' first item retrieved is a toilet from a fancy hotel. The ditzy maid nicknames the toilet after the hotel, and makes such a fuss over it that the team adopt the thing as their "mascot".
- A rather sad example in May. May's only friend is a china doll called Suzy, in a little glass display case. She talks to Suzy, gets advice from Suzy, tries to surprise Suzy when she gets contacts to fix her lazy eye... As the movie goes on and the already unstable May's attempts to find a real friend fail miserably, she starts to genuinely think Suzy is actually alive, and starts to hate her sometimes, blaming Suzy for her own social mishaps. Eventually May, otherwise completely alone again, decides to make it up with Suzy and be best friends again... Only for Suzy to get accidentally broken by some blind kids the next day.
- The title object in Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short film The Red Balloon sort of combines this with Magic Realism, in that it does seem to have a definite mind and will of its own.
- The Maiden Heist, being about three art museum security guards who have over the years fallen in love with one particular art piece each, brings this trope to mind.
- The dancing hula girl toy is the good luck charm of the Space Cowboys. Shown at the beginning during the failed test flight, then in a church, and finally in the shuttle.
- Gone in Sixty Seconds - in at least the 2000 version, Memphis treats one of the cars he's stealing (a make and model he has a previous history with, and has the reputation of being finicky) as a Tsundere woman, addressing her as "Eleanor".
- Tony Stark has "dummy," a bumbling robot arm that he constantly scolds and threatens to give away to local colleges, and then it saves his life by getting his arc reactor to him in time to which he says, "Good boy."
- While Han and co. stop in The Empire Strikes Back to repair the Millennium Falcon, C-3PO actually interfaces with the Falcon to diagnose its problem, and reports back to Han that "I don't know where your ship learned to communicate, but it has the most peculiar dialect."
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