Compare And Contrast Super Toys Last All Summer Long

Children are often curious about the world and their existence, however, when a child is unique on the most fundamental and biological levels, it leads to thoughts, emotions, and experiences that are not so ordinary. Brian Aldiss’s short story, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, and Steven Spielberg’s film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, both tell a story of a young boy questioning his identity and his relationships with others, however, his level of knowledge and self awareness which varies between the story and movie leads him to searching for these answers in dramatically different ways. David, the protagonist in both the short story and film, is a robot boy whose one desire is to love and be loved in return by his mother, Monica. However,

Although both the short story and film tell a sad tale of David feeling overlooked in his pursuits of Monica’s love and acceptance, the short story presents a heartbreaking narrative of a young, naive child who can’t rationalize why his admiration for his mother feels unrequited, while the film is a story of a boy who wants to change himself in hopes of gaining her adoration. David, as characterized in both the story and film, deeply loves and reverses his mother, but her treatment towards him leaves David feeling dubious about his importance in Monica’s life. In both the story and movie, David is a young boy who expresses his love through writing Monica letters. Some of her behaviors that David witnesses, however, plants seeds of doubt in him about the reciprocity of these feelings which he expresses in those letters. In the story, this is clearly demonstrated when Monica’s husband Henry comes home and reveals the news that they won the lottery to have a child after waiting four years. In this part of the story, Monica pensively looks out the window into the garden, so

In the story, David is characterized as a young, innocent boy who is only three years old. His naivety makes it so that his parents and his robot teddy bear companion, Teddy, keep him in the dark about who he is. In fact, Teddy goes so far as to explicitly lie to David. In the midst of writing the letters to Monica, David asks Teddy, “You and I are real, Teddy, aren’t we?” Teddy, with a neutral expression, replies, “You and I are real, David” (Aldiss). This deception, as well as Monica and Henry’s failure to disclose the truth, means that while David is adept enough to recognize his seemingly one-sided relationship with his mother, he is not able to comprehend the reasoning being that he was created solely to be Monica’s replacement for a human son. This degree of tragedy and sadness is presented in a different way within the film. In contrast, David is a few years older, which explains his heightened knowledge and self-awareness that is lacking in the story’s version. This means that David is fully aware of his differences, since he can’t eat or doesn’t require sleep like the other people around him. However, rather than simply being ignorant of his mother’s reasoning for not loving him, he acknowledges this barrier and wishes to