Why does Wall•E have recording equipment?

Question

I can't see how being able to record sound would be useful to a portable rubbish compactor.

Bonus points for explaining why it seems to be analogue!

Answer 1

I can’t find any interviews explaining why he has the audio recorder, so here are two of my guesses:

• Having some canned messages he can play to any friendly humans he encounters.
• Being able to carry messages between people (probably supervisors).

I’ve seen some theories that WALL·E wired it in himself, but I can’t find a high-enough resolution shot of one of the broken WALL·E units to check this idea.

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Now the more interesting question: why is it an analogue recorder?

I’ve looked around, and I can’t actually find any evidence that it is analogue. It seems to be based on the design of his buttons, which look like a traditional cassette player:

But we never see an actual cassette, and besides, wouldn’t an audio cassette have worn out by now? And we never see at the end of the film when

he gets crushed.

I think it’s actually a digital recorder with these chunky buttons.

These buttons make a fair amount of sense:

• The large indentations make tactile discovery easy, which is useful if visibility is poor (for example, in a dust storm).
• The large indentations make them easy to find by touch (for a human operator, at least).
• They look like mechanical switches, which are more durable in harsh environments than something like a touchscreen or click wheel.
• He’s a mass produced unit, and simple buttons like that are cheap.
• large mechanical buttons are easier to operate with gloves and clumsy mechanical hands

That’s still a guess – point to proof that it was an analogue recorder and I’ll retract this part – but it’s the best guess I have.

Answer 2

Although I can't answer why Wall-E might have had a recording system (beyond speculative reasoning) I can explain why it would make sense to have mechanical buttons on a robot such as Wall-E-- Wall-E works in a rugged, dirty environment and mechanical equipment is far more durable than sophisticated electronics.

When engineering mechanical devices, designers must consider the rugged nature of the use case. If you were to design a robot to be used in an office space, with clean air and minimal chance of forceful damage, you can design a robot with a plastic, "slick" exterior, equipped with touch screens (or holographic, interactive projection systems that user's can interact with), small moving parts and other little details that could easily break when exposed to the elements.

However, when working with rugged equipment that will get dirty, you have to engineer for wear-and-tear, weather, dirt, grime, dust, force-full impacts, etc. A touch interface would quickly be covered in grime and it could be annoying to properly maintain in the field.

An interactive, holographic, projection system could also be hard to maintain because, again, dirt and grime could smudge the projector lens and, potentially, cause false-positive user input interactions or block portions of the holographic projection.

Of course, if one thinks about this too much, you may realize that this doesn't seem to be an accurate assumption because for as rugged as Wall-E is, he still has very complex eyes cameras for seeing, which should also be limited by all of these environmental issues. This might be true, but for this design I think it's safe to assume that the artists at Pixar probably decided to forgo a little realism in order to paint a picture of a rugged but very emotional robot.

Artistically, Wall-E is a balance of mechanical engineering and artistic expression. Some things exist without real world importance. The recording unit isn't necessary for a mini-trash compactor. However, if someone were to engineer a similar device today, or for years to come, mechanical buttons would most-certainly be used due to their durability. This is something that I think Pixar considered and probably came to the correct design conclusion.

I don't see these style of buttons going away for decades, if not centuries, to come when the environment dictates.

Answer 3

Ubiquitous surveillance. The human society in the film is clearly highly regulated and monitored, so it seems perfectly plausible that every electronic device would be required to record nearby activity, so it could be accessed later to detect crime. The fact that it's analogue tells us that there was a serious hacking problem, so analogue recordings are made on physical tape because then they can't be accessed remotely by unauthorised people -- you have to get physical access to the tape to play back the recording.

Answer 4

According to a footnote in The Art of Wall•E, the primary out-of-universe driver seems to be that Wall•E was heavily inspired by Star Wars' R2-D2. Since R2-D2 (famously) has recording equipment, it stands to reason that Wall•E has to have it as well.

Everybody in this building was influenced by Star Wars. That was Andrew Stanton's inspiration. He said "I want to do 'R2-D2: The Movie' ". Because he loved R2-D2 so much, he wanted to do a movie with a character who doesn't speak.

Jim Reardon: Head of Story.

Answer 5

I believe Wall-E added the recorder himself.

Wall-E has the ability to replace his own parts. He also is continuously looking for new items to use among the junk that he processes.

It makes sense that if Wall-E found something that he could use while accomplishing his directive that would make it more enjoyable, he would want to bring it with him. And if he could find a way to attach it to himself so he wouldn't have to carry it, he would. This explains why it has buttons; if it was standard equipment, he would activate it internally, just like he does the trash compactor. (There is no button to start the compactor function.)

Answer 6

Wall-E is monolingual. There is a scene about it where Eve goes through a library of languages until Wall-E comprehends "directive".

The program wasn't "rebuild America", it was rebuild earth. The Wall-E units were globally deployed. This means they were deployed in many places where English was not the dominant language.

I think the recording was about communicating a "we are here to help, go get a free ride on a star-liner" in many languages to remaining humans.