tl;dr trains with faces are creepy
Stephen King's The Dark Tower spoiler below:
Stephen King's masterpiece "The Dark Tower" series has an intelligent AI in the third book called "Blain the Train". The dark tower series starts off as a kind of medieval Western in some barren dessert world and pretty soon there are doorways to parallel worlds and times like New York City. One parallel world was once populated by a society that is probably a few hundred years ahead of us technologically speaking, but they were warlike and killed themselves off. All that is left is Blaine the Monorail and Patricia the Train and they are super homicidally insane. I've been scared of Thomas ever since.
"Part of it, perhaps, is that Thomas and his world are innately horrendous, and there’s something horrendous about taking all that off the rails and into a digital space. The original books, penned in the 1940s by the Anglican reverend Wilbert Awdry, now read like an enthusiastic allegory for bigotry and exploitation. The New Yorker, among other publications, has a ghoulish piece of essayistic fiction on the drizzly dystopia that is Thomas’s Island of Sodor, where cheerful anthropomorphic machines are torn apart, worked to death or bricked up in tunnels at the whim of a well-heeled Fat Controller. For all its dark corners and clutching cadavers, Resident Evil 2’s setting can seem almost benign by comparison."
Cracked also articulated it well:
https://www.cracked.com/article_19673_6-insane-but-convincin...
(Another show with cheery, brightly colored human-machine hybrids existing in a highly regulated totalitarian structure is Teletubbies, although it's more of a Brave New World to Thomas's 1984. You do see creepy Teletubby "cursed images" from time to time...)
This reminds me of one of my favourite Cyanide & Happiness comics:
A Gingerbread man lives in a Gingerbread house. Is the house made of him? Or is he made of house? He screams, for he does not know.
https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sad_Story_of_Henry
This particular episode horrifies me; I feel like kids will grow up and as adults, look back on this and wonder how they didn't realize how dark it was, much like I do with some parts of things like The Brave Little Toaster.
"But I think he deserved his punishment. Don't you?"
Edit: Oh, it's actually from the very first book published 1945.
...speaking as a father who used to take a book with me to read when my daughter used to throw herself to the ground and refuse to walk any further.
He still has the blocks, but poor Thomas is no more.