10 Heart-Breaking Pixar Backstories You Probably Missed

10. Wall-E Had To Watch His Friends Die

The great tragedy of Wall-E is supposed to be that despite his being alone for hundreds of years he's a great romantic, driven by something as simple and as pure as the desire to hold hands and feel loved. Watch your heart doesn't melt there.

But the real tragedy is how Wall-E got to be alone: he was clearly one of a significant number of trash-bots, and while you could suggest that his sentience was an accident of programming, he's far from the only sentient robot, and it seems it was a choice rather than a malfunction (as EVE's arc confirms). So at one stage, Wall-E might have had friends, and over the course of 800 years, he lost all to malfunctions that he couldn't fix, while he fruitlessly hoarded his treasures with the simple, impossible dream of having someone - anyone - to show them off to.

Strangely, his own abandonment issues don't stop him from making his only friend - the curiously dog-like cockroach companion - wait for him while he goes off in pursuit of EVE. That seems somewhat short-memoried of him, but then perhaps that's the real tragedy: that abandonment is entirely normative behaviour for him.