Rocket Scientist

And now, on a different note, I want to talk about something completely different: WALL-E.

Yes, I saw it in the theatres, but I loved it.  Loved it. So, Lee got it for me for my birthday.

Oh, not for the science.  Let’s face it, the level of garbage and filth on the planet surface was excessive.  And the notion that a luxury liner could go off and survive with sufficient supplies for centuries when it was only supposed to be less than ten years, is completely unreasonable.

It doesn’t matter.  There are only a few movie companies that can make robots absolutely endearing.  Pixar is clearly one of them.  WALL-E is so endearing, so charming, so absolutely convincing as an individual (much more so than most of the “people”), I’d follow him anywhere he led.  The expressions and body language were completely believable and readable.  The sound engineers did a masterful job bringing WALL-E to empathetic life.  Heck, they made a cockroach completely loveable.

So, what does this have to do with science?  Well, computer generated movies are big science, big technology.  But to do this, to bring WALL-E and EVE and all the rest to vibrant life, they needed something else: an exceptional understanding of how people act, sound, react, think, even dream, all to convey on screen so that the viewer falls a little bit in love with WALL-E.

That ability, to take something clearly not human, something completely new and foreign, and make it something familiar, endearing, approachable.  Well, there’s a goal for any writer of speculative fiction.  The bar’s pretty high, but I know what I’m shooting for now.

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