For forty minutes of Wall-E, you’re watching a trash compactor robot trundle through an abandoned world alone.
No dialogue. No explanation. Just a machine doing its job in an empty place, staring up at the sky, dreaming of something it can’t name. Connection? Companionship? Love? By the time another robot arrives, you don’t just care what happens to this pile of metal and circuits. You’re deeply, emotionally invested in whether it finds what it’s looking for.
Andrew Stanton, the film’s director, called this the purest form of storytelling. He made something non-human fundamentally human.
Here’s the thing: you can’t care about something unless you see yourself in it. And you can’t see yourself in something unless it’s human — or at least, unless it expresses humanity.
When I was seven or eight, I read a Doctor Who comic that stayed with me. A robot, abandoned on an empty world, begging not to be left behind. I remember crying. Not because a robot was alone, but because loneliness itself was real, and I understood it.
Both Wall-E and that robot are humanised. They’re not programmed machines — they’re beings capable of suffering. Of wanting. Of being afraid. Of missing something they’ve never even had.
This matters desperately in business communication, and almost nobody gets it right.
Most business writing is about organisations, not people. Posts about “our company values” or “we’re passionate about delivering solutions”. You don’t care about that. You couldn’t care about that, because you can’t see yourself in an abstract corporate entity. There’s no longing there. No vulnerability. No capacity to fail or hurt or be abandoned.
The reason people connect with stories is because stories are fundamentally about people. About what we want. About what we fear. About whether we belong.
When you’re telling a business story, you need to find the human centre. Who wanted something? What were they willing to sacrifice for it? What did they fear? Not because it’s emotionally manipulative to make people care — but because it’s the only honest way to tell the story.
Make me care. That’s Stanton’s first commandment. And the way you do it is through humanisation.
Show the longing. Show the loneliness. Show what it feels like to be that character — whether they’re a robot, a startup founder, or someone trying to build something that matters. Make them flawed enough that they’re recognisable. Make them vulnerable enough that you can imagine their fear. Make them human enough that you see yourself in them.
Without that, you’re just describing an organisation or a transaction or a process.
With it, you’re telling the story of a being trying to matter.
And that’s the story everybody leans in to hear.