Paprika hidden meaning I didn't understand until now

I’m just barely beginning, still on first three levels of Wanikani. But I just thought of something!

In the animated film Paprika, in a dream there’s an engineer who is very large and fat who turns into a robot. Originally I thought it was something to do with how he’d prefer not to have a body or something.

I recently learned the kanji for big たい, fat だい and machine だい. I bet the similarity is a play on words that they use. That’s so cool! I hope to understand more stuff like this as I learn.

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Seems far-fetched. だい is common on’yomi. I don’t think anyone would associate 太 and 台. Besides, 台 doesn’t mean a robot or machine by itself. It’s a counter used to count things like cars, vehicles, computers, and probably robots.

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I think WK’s calling 台 as the counter for ‘big machines’ is a bit inaccurate as from what I can see it’s really more for counting things like electronic devices, appliances, vehicles and maybe heavy machinery like construction equipment. 機 seems to be the counter used for truly large machines like aircraft, Gundams (yes I originally stumbled upon this searching for a counter for Gundams and found a reddit post linked to a Yahoo Japan conservation on the topic :sweat_smile:), etc. Lastly, for things like Androids and humanoid robots 体 is used.

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