Wall-E

[JonFromMaplewood]

So, did anyone take their kids to see this? Or did anyone attend a viewing with the theater packed with frustrated, noisy kids who had no idea what was going on?

I know it's a kid's movie, but... do kids like this?

Took my kids...4 and 8.  They loved it and asked to see it again. We've seen it twice now.

[erika]

I don't see what there is for a kid not to understand in that movie.... it's a straight up kids movie. They usually have an underlying adult-focused message, and this one was no different.

Emdasher, were these kids you saw the movie with eating lead candy?

[Sarah]

It was the presumption that the kids were applauding "a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out" that got me. 

Come on.

[emdasher]

I don't see what there is for a kid not to understand in that movie.... it's a straight up kids movie. They usually have an underlying adult-focused message, and this one was no different.

Emdasher, were these kids you saw the movie with eating lead candy?

The physical choreography of the film seems more akin to a set piece in an adult action movie than anything in any kids movie I've ever seen. On my first viewing, I myself can admit to getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire physical aspect of the film. More than subject matter or underlying message, I could see kids getting frustrated at the intricacy of everything going on on the screen.

[JonFromMaplewood]

I could see kids getting frustrated at the intricacy of everything going on on the screen.

I think you may have been projecting a little onto the kids.  Like us, they filter out what is irrelevant to them.  We see masterful storytelling and gorgeous animation, the kids see a fish singing "Don't Worry, Be Happy," robots making funny noises, and good guys beating the bad guys.

On a more tragic note, when my 4-year-old son saw all the people on the Axiom in their hovering chairs, he whispered to me, "I wish I was them. Those chairs are cool!"  Ew buoy.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/080706_wall_e/

Hey, I totally know that guy. 

Now that you've gotten through that great story with something for everybody, I just saw Wall-E and I definitely liked it, but not as much as Ratalouie.  I tend to think that the real ideology of any Hollywood movie, "liberal" or "conservative," is, in the end, the ideology of Hollywood (for example, it's love for Wall-E that compels Eve to complete her mission, rather than her programming or any moral or ethical sense; that's just fine, of course, but that's an example of what I mean - was it Deleuze and Guattari* who said that the movie was a machine for the production of the couple?).

But anyway, I wish somebody would tell the people who are treating the movie like a revolutionary act that it is a movie, one that (like most movies) probably ate up a lot of energy to produce, and that there are going to be millions of plastic tie-in toys, and so on.  Again, I'm not complaining about this - it was a terrific movie, certainly worth my $20 (with popcorn and sody), and if I had a kid I'd be happy to buy him/her a cute Wall-E toy - but it seems emblematic of our current mess that a cartoon fantasy of environmental reclamation is being mistaken for the real thing.  Yay Pixar, but phooey on both Frank Rich and those clueless right-wing goons.



*Forgive me for being a pedantic ass

[kray]

I only know Michael Ian Black from VH1's myriad "I Love the..." shows, and he never fails to make me want to punch him in the face. Obnoxious and so NOT funny, at least on there. Maybe his sketch and standup work is different.

i'm on the opposite plane. i've only seen him live. it was good. showalter was better. their blogs are fine.

[jbissell]

I nominate WALL-E as the official movie of hardhat radio.

[emdasher]

The LA Times on the new Beck album: "Modern Guilt is “Wall-E” for anyone who prefers rock 'n' roll to kids' movies."

My head just exploded.

[AllisonLeGnome]

I totally loved it!

I saw it at 10:30 PM, so there weren't a lot of small children to deal with- much to my disappointment, there were a whole four other people besides myself and a friend in a theater. Rather ironically, at the camp where I work a kid was talking about how his mom wouldn't get him the official toy from the Disney website because it was too expensive, but that sort of thing is to be expected from any movie aimed at children.

Plus, everyone's favorite fundamentalist website, Rapture Ready, thought it was "full of lib agenda", so there's that.

(On the standup of Michael(s) Ian Black/Showalter: I enjoyed them both live, particularly Showalter, but I didn't think either translated well to their albums.)

[Matt]

I think this might the best piece of journalism I've read since Deion Sanders stuck up for Michael Vick:

Fat-E
The new Pixar movie goes out of its way to equate obesity with environmental collapse.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, July 10, 2008, at 4:46 PM ET

The hero of Pixar's new film
Pixar's new animated feature Wall-E is more than a great movie. According to the critics, it's a trenchant social commentary. New York's David Edelstein calls it "one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world … a sublime work of art." A.O. Scott coos over "a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in." Even New York Times columnist Frank Rich gets in on the action, lauding the film for being "in touch with what troubles America," and providing "a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out."

So what is this powerful and profound message? Wall-E tells us that if we don't change the way we live, we'll all get really fat and destroy the world. The plot begins with the idea that a megacorporation called Buy N Large has essentially taken over the planet and induced so much consumption and waste that humans must escape their dying planet on an enormous, space-faring cruise ship. Once onboard, their self-destructive tendencies only get worse: After 700 years adrift, humans have grown too bloated to walk and too lazy to think.

It's this cartoon of—oops, commentary on—modern life that so dazzles the critics. Slate's Dana Stevens describes a "richly detailed satire of contemporary humankind," in which the world is populated by "obese, infantile consumers who spend their days immobile in hovering lounge chairs, staring at ads on computers screens—in other words, Americans." (Edelstein sums things up in five words: "You should see these blobs.")

Let me raise a voice of dissent. Wall-E is an innovative and visually stunning film, but the "satire" it draws is simple-minded. It plays off the easy analogy between obesity and ecological catastrophe, pushing the notion that Western culture has sickened both our bodies and our planet with the same disease of affluence. According to this lazy logic, a fat body stands in for a distended culture: We gain weight and the Earth suffers. If only society could get off its big, fat ass and go on a diet!

But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar myths about the overweight: They're weak-willed, indolent, and stupid. Sure enough, that's how Pixar depicts the future of humanity. The people in Wall-E drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," they never exercise, and if they happen to fall off their hovering chairs, they thrash around like babies until a robot helps them up. They watch TV all day long and can barely read.

It ought to go without saying that this stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA. (Your height is similarly heritable.) That is to say, it may not matter that much whether you eat salads or drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," whether you bike everywhere or fly around in a Barcalounger. If you have a propensity to become obese, there's only so much that can be done about it.

That's not to say that our circumstances can't lead us to gain weight. But there's little evidence that overeating causes obesity on an individual level and no real reason to think that anyone can lose a lot of weight by dieting. (Most of us fluctuate around a natural "set point.") We also know that children who watch a lot of television are no less active than other kids and that pediatric obesity rates are not the direct result of high-fat diets.

Despite all this, there's an endless appetite for stories linking obesity and environmental collapse. Pounds of fat and pounds of carbon are routinely made to seem interchangeable. Two months ago, the Washington Post compared childhood obesity to global warming. Last year, an AP story called "Fighting Fat and Climate Change" claimed that we could cut annual CO2-emissions by 64 million tons if every American just got out of his car to walk for half an hour a day. (The nation would also burn 10.5 trillion calories!) The New York Times has reported that obese Americans make air travel less efficient, and that our extra pounds cost us 1 billion gallons of gasoline per year. And we didn't just figure this out, either: During the oil crisis of the 1970s, a pair of economists calculated that we could save 1.3 billion gallons by getting all overweight Americans to "optimum body weight."

These calculations show the obesity-ecology metaphor run amok. Like other spurious estimates of the "cost of obesity," they leave out important, mitigating variables. (Fat people tend to have shorter life spans, for example, thus reducing their lifetime carbon footprint.) It's pure fantasy to say that overweight Americans are causing global warming and misleading even to suggest that the two phenomena are related. After all, obesity is most prevalent among the poorest Americans, who almost by definition consume less than the skinny elite. Many live in dense neighborhoods and rely on public transportation. And the fattest people in the nation are not, as a group, the same folks you'd find driving Hummers or jetting back and forth between New York and L.A.

The desire to link obesity and environmental collapse seems to have more to do with politics than science. Eco-liberals put down their Nalgene bottles and wring their hands over the fat slobs in Middle America. It's these red-staters who are screwing things up with their shopping malls and their fast food. Of course, they can't exactly be blamed for their misfortune. Instead, we infantilize them and moan over the corporate interests that beguile our dumb cousins with super-sized portions and deceptive PR campaigns. Hence the overgrown babies of Wall-E, who have been duped into their lethargic lifestyle by the corporate overlords at Buy N Large.

All this may be enough to leave some overweight viewers of Wall-E in tears. It's easy to imagine how they might respond to Pixar's dystopic vision of our fat future, in which puffed-up bodies are played for cheap laughs. What happens when the movie ends and the lights come up? Does the rest of the audience stare at the lone fatty as she waddles her way toward the theater doors? Do they see in her body a validation of the film's "darker implications"—a signpost for what we might become if we don't change our ways? Or do they just scowl at her, convinced that she's part of the problem?

http://www.slate.com/id/2195126/

A lot of people left some pretty vicious comments; many posited that the author of the article is, in fact, a fatty. Here's my favorite comment, written by "tireguy":

What complete stupidity and twisted sense of righteous belief prompted you to write this ridiculous article? If you think that this is witty social commentary, think again. It is the worst sort of liberal drivel compounded by sophistry and incompetent manipulation of the English language. It is a cartoon, dummy - not an evil plot against the overweight. Get real or get out. Your editors should be ashamed - I doubt you possess a sense of shame, since you produced this sort of journalistic trash.

If only it weren't so long, it would be my new sig.

[dave from knoxville]

Yeah the credits were one of my favorite parts. The fact that they went through from hieroglyphics to mosaic to impressionist, etc. etc. etc. in chronological order was pretty awesome.

Of course almost no one in the theater I was at bothered to stick around at all, but I guess the credits aren't of much interest to the little ones.

No, the moment the story ends, they have to get back to the vital work of destroying marriages.

[yesno]

I read that Slate article.  The author WAY overstates his case.  If obesity were simply a matter of genetics, as he implies (writing "How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA."), then the per capita number of obese people should be the same county to country, or through time.  In actuality, the percentage of obese Americans has doubled since the early 1960s.  The "caloric environment" (wide availability of high calorie, cheap food) obviously affects people's behavior. Due to genetic factors, it affects some people more than others.

I agree that people aren't necessarily to blame for their natural reactions to this situation, but it's disingenuous to claim that there is nothing that these people can do.  There is some number of people who are obese today that wouldn't have been 50 years ago.  If they can contrive, however difficult it may be, to eat and live as though it were 50 years ago, they would not be obese.  Being hateful is not in order, but neither should we shrug our shoulders and pretend like there's no problem or that there's nothing that an obese person can unilaterally do to lose weight.  In the end, unless we really want to contemplate pervasively regulating what food people can eat, the solution is going to have to come about from changes in people's behavior.

[A.M. Thomas]

I think this might the best piece of journalism I've read since Deion Sanders stuck up for Michael Vick:

Fat-E
The new Pixar movie goes out of its way to equate obesity with environmental collapse.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, July 10, 2008, at 4:46 PM ET

The hero of Pixar's new film
Pixar's new animated feature Wall-E is more than a great movie. According to the critics, it's a trenchant social commentary. New York's David Edelstein calls it "one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world … a sublime work of art." A.O. Scott coos over "a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in." Even New York Times columnist Frank Rich gets in on the action, lauding the film for being "in touch with what troubles America," and providing "a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out."

So what is this powerful and profound message? Wall-E tells us that if we don't change the way we live, we'll all get really fat and destroy the world. The plot begins with the idea that a megacorporation called Buy N Large has essentially taken over the planet and induced so much consumption and waste that humans must escape their dying planet on an enormous, space-faring cruise ship. Once onboard, their self-destructive tendencies only get worse: After 700 years adrift, humans have grown too bloated to walk and too lazy to think.

It's this cartoon of—oops, commentary on—modern life that so dazzles the critics. Slate's Dana Stevens describes a "richly detailed satire of contemporary humankind," in which the world is populated by "obese, infantile consumers who spend their days immobile in hovering lounge chairs, staring at ads on computers screens—in other words, Americans." (Edelstein sums things up in five words: "You should see these blobs.")

Let me raise a voice of dissent. Wall-E is an innovative and visually stunning film, but the "satire" it draws is simple-minded. It plays off the easy analogy between obesity and ecological catastrophe, pushing the notion that Western culture has sickened both our bodies and our planet with the same disease of affluence. According to this lazy logic, a fat body stands in for a distended culture: We gain weight and the Earth suffers. If only society could get off its big, fat ass and go on a diet!

But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar myths about the overweight: They're weak-willed, indolent, and stupid. Sure enough, that's how Pixar depicts the future of humanity. The people in Wall-E drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," they never exercise, and if they happen to fall off their hovering chairs, they thrash around like babies until a robot helps them up. They watch TV all day long and can barely read.

It ought to go without saying that this stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA. (Your height is similarly heritable.) That is to say, it may not matter that much whether you eat salads or drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," whether you bike everywhere or fly around in a Barcalounger. If you have a propensity to become obese, there's only so much that can be done about it.

That's not to say that our circumstances can't lead us to gain weight. But there's little evidence that overeating causes obesity on an individual level and no real reason to think that anyone can lose a lot of weight by dieting. (Most of us fluctuate around a natural "set point.") We also know that children who watch a lot of television are no less active than other kids and that pediatric obesity rates are not the direct result of high-fat diets.

Despite all this, there's an endless appetite for stories linking obesity and environmental collapse. Pounds of fat and pounds of carbon are routinely made to seem interchangeable. Two months ago, the Washington Post compared childhood obesity to global warming. Last year, an AP story called "Fighting Fat and Climate Change" claimed that we could cut annual CO2-emissions by 64 million tons if every American just got out of his car to walk for half an hour a day. (The nation would also burn 10.5 trillion calories!) The New York Times has reported that obese Americans make air travel less efficient, and that our extra pounds cost us 1 billion gallons of gasoline per year. And we didn't just figure this out, either: During the oil crisis of the 1970s, a pair of economists calculated that we could save 1.3 billion gallons by getting all overweight Americans to "optimum body weight."

These calculations show the obesity-ecology metaphor run amok. Like other spurious estimates of the "cost of obesity," they leave out important, mitigating variables. (Fat people tend to have shorter life spans, for example, thus reducing their lifetime carbon footprint.) It's pure fantasy to say that overweight Americans are causing global warming and misleading even to suggest that the two phenomena are related. After all, obesity is most prevalent among the poorest Americans, who almost by definition consume less than the skinny elite. Many live in dense neighborhoods and rely on public transportation. And the fattest people in the nation are not, as a group, the same folks you'd find driving Hummers or jetting back and forth between New York and L.A.

The desire to link obesity and environmental collapse seems to have more to do with politics than science. Eco-liberals put down their Nalgene bottles and wring their hands over the fat slobs in Middle America. It's these red-staters who are screwing things up with their shopping malls and their fast food. Of course, they can't exactly be blamed for their misfortune. Instead, we infantilize them and moan over the corporate interests that beguile our dumb cousins with super-sized portions and deceptive PR campaigns. Hence the overgrown babies of Wall-E, who have been duped into their lethargic lifestyle by the corporate overlords at Buy N Large.

All this may be enough to leave some overweight viewers of Wall-E in tears. It's easy to imagine how they might respond to Pixar's dystopic vision of our fat future, in which puffed-up bodies are played for cheap laughs. What happens when the movie ends and the lights come up? Does the rest of the audience stare at the lone fatty as she waddles her way toward the theater doors? Do they see in her body a validation of the film's "darker implications"—a signpost for what we might become if we don't change our ways? Or do they just scowl at her, convinced that she's part of the problem?

http://www.slate.com/id/2195126/

A lot of people left some pretty vicious comments; many posited that the author of the article is, in fact, a fatty. Here's my favorite comment, written by "tireguy":

What complete stupidity and twisted sense of righteous belief prompted you to write this ridiculous article? If you think that this is witty social commentary, think again. It is the worst sort of liberal drivel compounded by sophistry and incompetent manipulation of the English language. It is a cartoon, dummy - not an evil plot against the overweight. Get real or get out. Your editors should be ashamed - I doubt you possess a sense of shame, since you produced this sort of journalistic trash.

If only it weren't so long, it would be my new sig.

Wait, so this guy is actually making the argument that an obese lifestyle is good for the environment because it shortens life spans?  Holy moly.

He's kind of missing the whole point of the obesity/environmental decline correlation.  It has a lot more to do with industrialized agriculture (i.e. the persistence of HFCS, corn-fed beef, artificial preserves, etc), than the fact that there are a lot of obese people.

[mokin]

I'm so tired of overweight people being offended by Wall-E. SERIOUSLY, people? It's just a goddamn movie. And if you eat too much and are sedentary, you're gonna get fat. That's all the movie is saying.

Getting the vapors and letting your monocle fall out over this sort of thing is so lame.