5/26/10

Massagebot humanized

I've seen floating around the Net several different artists' visions of what the two main characters of WALL·E, WALL·E and EVE, would look like if they were human; one even threw in MO and AUTO. But when I watched the movie for the first time recently, a different character caught my eye.


This is the human version of the robot character named HAN-S, which I prefer referring to as "the Massagebot". In the film, WALL·E and EVE are taken to the ship's robot repair room, which is full of malfunctioning robots. One of these is HAN-S, a robot designed to massage the humans, that has a glitch causing it to use its powerful arms to flail and pound everything in sight. It thus has to be restrained, arms pinned to its sides; later, in a jam, WALL·E releases its arms, and the result is nothing short of a completely devastating assault on the Axiom's security warden-bots.
Ever since I first saw it, I envisioned the repair room as the robotic equivalent of a psyche ward. A makeup-bot, for instance, continuously applies makeup to anyone or anything near her/it; in a human, of course, this would be termed obsessive-compulsive behavior. The Massagebot is, naturally, a violent psychotic.
Please note that in the movie the robot is not, in fact, yellow and white, but this color scheme entered my head and refused to get out. Besides, you can only get so creative with white and off-white. The lightning streak in the hair was inspired by Freakazoid, another mentally unstable (but far more benign) individual.

Drawn using:
No. 2 pencil (sketch)
Blue 0.5 needle tip pen
Adobe Illustrator CS3
Serif PhotoPlus 6.0

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