How WALL-E broke gender stereotypes in robots

The Pixar movie WALL-E is set in a distant dystopian future where earth is entirely covered in garbage which has driven humanity to escape the planet and live on space ships for 700 years. A robot called WALL-E is the protagonist of the story. It’s purpose was to collect garbage and allocate it somewhere else. WALL-E is the last robot on earth and has started to develop a personality and get a little bit lonely. That is when another robot called EVE descends to Earth from the spaceships with a mission to find evidence for plant life which WALL-E happens to have. When WALL-E sees EVE it falls in love instantly.

When I re-watched the movie sometime ago I noticed how some gender stereotypes are used to infer gender to the robots, but also how some other stereotypes are broken, and I believe that the latter is more prominent. WALL-E is cubic in shape and is covered with stains, while EVE is sleek in design and looks brand new with a shiny white color. Also EVE has a somewhat feminine voice while WALL-E leans a little bit to the masculine side (but not the stereotypical macho man). This is the first evidence we get that WALL-E is a boy while EVE is a girl, however this evidence are not strong enough to definitively assume gender and I believe that this was an active decision that Pixar took (to make them slightly gender neutral).

For the purposes of this essay let’s assume that WALL-E is a boy and EVE is a girl. EVE is the tough military and technologically advanced bot with a mission to save the entire planet while WALL-E is portrayed as musical loving homebody who cares for and supports the character with the mission to save the entire planet. This is clearly a switch in gender roles and turned out to be very successful among critics and movie goers.