Transcendentalism In Wall-E

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“Where I Lived and What I Lived For” was written in 1854 by Hendry David Thoreau, subsuming Transcendentalist beliefs of the time period. Thoreau writes in a first-person existential narrative, reflecting on prior events in life and the propriety of said decisions. This narrative style affirms his beliefs of: elected seclusion, dissatisfaction of civilization, imperative of self-reliance, and the value of nature. Over a hundred and fifty years later, ideals highly regarded by Thoreau and the Transcendentalist of the time are still ever present in modern-American media. Wall-E, a Pixar animated film written by Andrew Stanton, tells a story of a robot name Wall-E, whose sole purpose is to clean up and condense the trash on an unoccupied-waste-covered Earth. In this science fiction comedy, Wall-E follows a robot named Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) designed to retrieve any signs of plant life on earth, delivering it to a space station inhabited by overweight-technology-dependent human beings. Throughout the movie humans become self-reliant, rebelling from the artificially intelligent robots on the ship, leading them to discover the importance of nature and the outside world. …show more content…

Thoreau believes in the removal of civilization by choice, while Wall-E was placed in involuntary isolation. Both works also hold nature in high regard, Thoreau’s for religious purposes and Wall-E’s for the sustainability of mankind. Wall-E and “Where I lived and What I Lived For” have themes of self-reliance, but one focuses on physical independence and the other focusing on the moral independence needed. These works both show the importance of free-thinking and the conservation of the environment, truly showing how all these ideological views transpire into real world problems, calling mankind forward to find a