Wall-E: bone mass, human-centered-ness, fat, gender, and race
| July 8th, 2008(There are some spoilers in this post.)
I was bewildered by the plot point about bone mass. The writers went out of their way to establish that generations of living in low gravity have reduced bone mass to the point that people can no longer stand upright — until the plot called for them to stand, at which point, they stood. It was especially hard to buy how easily all the humans were standing on Earth at the end; they should have been writhing in agony after reaching Earth. And they definitely should not have been able to walk.
It bewilders me, because they could have avoided the whole problem by not bringing it up in the first place. I’d be quite happy to accept a movie just ignoring the problem. But why explicitly bring up a problem in the script just so they can fail to solve it?
The best part of the movie — the first forty minutes or so, before the plot leaves the planet’s surface — presents a world in which humans are entirely absent (although the evidence we were once there is all over the place). And it was pretty damn cool, because humanity wasn’t the subject of the movie; it’s a movie about robots. Then, in the final act, suddenly the plot became human-centric. It’s as if the humans writing the film couldn’t stand letting the story be centered on non-humans.
The film would have been better if it were indifferent to the fate of the humans. I would have loved it if all the humans had died in the course of the film, but the ending was nonetheless happy because Wall-E and Eve lived happily ever after. (Why should they care what happens to the meat?)
* * *
FAT
A lot of bloggers have been commenting on the politics of Wall-E. On the up side, conservative bloggers hate this film, so gotta love that.
On the down side, it’s been getting a lot of criticism from pro-fat blogs, and rightly so. The Chicago Tribune review (via Big Fat Blog) summed up the film’s take on fat:
Awaiting the word that Earth is once again habitable, the ship spends year after year in space, sustaining the last remaining humans–blobby, pampered creatures who never get out of their whiz-bang flying loungers long enough to look at what they’ve become.
My take on this is that although there was annoying fat bigotry built into the film’s concept, I’ve seen much worse. I was able to enjoy the film despite the fat bigotry.
But it’s going to depend on one’s individual taste. Wall-E’s fat characters aren’t contemptible, repulsive slobs, like Fat Bastard, nor — despite the constant sipping of drinks — are they food-obsessed like Homer Simpson. Instead, they’re presented as huge infants: round, helpless, cheerful and friendly. So unlike Jessica, I didn’t find it all that wince-able, and enjoyed the film.
Fatshonista points out that Pixar apparently changed the film to make it less anti-fat, compared to its initial conception.
My Pixar friend said that essentially, the idea is that humanity was supposed to spend just 5 years on the luxury spaceship, but got trapped for 700 years, and because of the super-artificial situation (it was meant to be a total vacation to recruit people into going), got dependent in an artificial way. Originally they were apparently designed to be rather more gross and creepy, and had no intelligible lines; both of those were changed by the team working on the movie because of concerns about what it would suggest about fat people.
Now, the equation of sloth + fast food = fatties is still at the heart of this, and is undeniably problematic.
I liked this comment from Rethink:
Pixar tries to suggest in one throw-away moment that the people are fat because they have been in space so long and lost some bone density, but the much clearer message is that they are chunky because they are lazy and eat too much (and several times the characters’ large size is used for visual jokes). A clear sign that Pixar recognized the nastiness of their message is that they chose not insult their target audience: kids. There are no children, let alone overweight children, at all on the ship — we see only babies and chubby adults. [And good luck finding images of any of the chubby characters in Disney's advertising for the film or the film's official website.]
More ironic still is that the film’s criticism seems to be levelled at the very folks who are viewing the movie — you and me, sitting there, doing nothing, watching a screen while consuming buttered popcorn and Junior Mints. The movie wants us to know that mass consumerism will doom this planet and its people. And you can show your support for that message by going out and buying all the Disney tie-in products and toys that will be filling your store shelves, and eventually your landfills, in the next 6-12 months.
I also think this post from Red No. 3, responding to defenders of the film, is good:
….irregardless of what sci-fi talk about bone density was snuck into the film, audiences took the characters to be fat and ultimately the audience interpration matters more culturally than the filmmakers intent. Intent is nice, but if that intent was not effectively communicated to the audience, it doesn’t matter. Just look through what the reviews say. From professionals to amateurs, people talking about the film have consistantly identified the future humans as “obese”. And of course they do, because that is the visual language the film is using, complete with cues about the characters’ gluttony and inactivity.
More fat-and-Wall-E blogging: Professor What If and Feministe.
* * *
GENDER
I haven’t seen much discussion of the genderization of the robots in Wall-E. Essentially, Wall-E is presented as male, while Eve is presented as female. Visually, this is done by constructing Wall-E of machinery that resembles construction site equipment — rusty, dirty, treader tracks and forklifts — while Eve is rendered to resemble a Macintosh computer — smooth, curved lines of white plastic. (As methods of making a robot femme goes, it could be much worse. Actually, it’s extraordinary they resisted the impulse to either color Eve pink, or to give her a bow or eyelashes.)
I wish the gendering hadn’t been done; it would have been wonderful if Pixar had shown a romance that wasn’t gendered at all. But still, as Professor What If says, props to Pixar for making Eve tough and strong (she rescues Wall-E several times during the film), for making Wall-E nurturing, and for not making Eve’s toughness a threat to Wall-E.
(And in case you’re wondering, no, this movie doesn’t pass The Bechdel Test.)
* * *
RACE
Oh, and although I’m sure folks will rationalize it (”in the racist Earth society, the people rescued and sent into space were disproportionately white!”), it bothered me that humanity, as presented in Wall-E, is overwhelmingly white. (I think some background characters were people of color; every single human who had a speaking role was white).
In a science fiction movie — and one that didn’t face any real-world casting limitations — there’s no excuse for not presenting humanity as it is. To reflect the actual make-up of humanity, most of the humans in Wall-E should have been Asian, with substantial minorities of Europeans, Africans, and Latin@s.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:17 am
I was a little bugged by the robot genders too– but more so by Moe. Moe is the tiny cleaner bot, and it is Japanese. The friend I saw the movie with and I both thought so.
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July 8th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Huh. I didn’t see that at all — but just because I didn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Can you be more specific?
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July 8th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Oh good Lord, when can a movie JUST BE A DAMNED MOVIE? My son wants to see this movie but maybe now I won’t take him for it will turn his little 11 year old mind into a flaming liberal. LOLOLOL Not.
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July 8th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I just looked it up to check Mo’s voice casting. It was the same guy who did WALL*E. Huh. I didn’t get Japanese off the character either.
I thought that one of the first two humans we saw were a black male and a white male (they were talking about meeting each other on a virtual golf range or something), but that’s only barely a speaking role.
I’d actually assumed that the mostly white passengers was deliberate, and was kind of appalled at the subtext of what must have happened to the rest of the world. Even if you assume that there were other ships that launched at other parts of the world (the background said the Axiom was a ‘flagship’ of a fleet), they couldn’t possibly have gotten the whole planetary population up in the time they had. I’m not sure whether it’s better or worse if it’s deliberate, actually.
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July 8th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I thought the movie was just tremendously entertaining - I guess that’s why we’re talking about it so much - especially the brilliant Chaplinesque animation of Wall-E.
But besides the heterosexual robots thing (I suppose that this could be justified by Wall-E’s sexual-identity indoctrination via Hello Dolly) . . . I found it irresponsible of Pixar to show the portraits of past captians of the Axiom as 1) all but one captain male, and 2) all but two (I think) captains white. Common Pixar, haven’t we reached the 21st century yet?
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:07 am
You know, I saw this movie this weekend, and as I was watching it, I thought “I wonder what Amp will say about the fat thing.”
I did a lot of thinking about the fat trope, and here were the three conclusions I came to:
1) It is true that if you leave humans for 700 years to do nothing but sit in floating barcaloungers and eat, they will be come fat.
2) The fact that humans will become fat if they do nothing but sit and eat does not logically imply that therefore all humans who ARE fat must do nothing but sit around and eat.
3) It still made me uncomfortable.
I will say that I liked that the captain helped save the day (go heroic fat characters!) and that the other two main human characters (Mary and, what was his name, Jim maybe?) were portrayed as sexual (in a child appropriate way) beings. (Touching hands, being subtly relationshippy, etc.)
And I really liked the movie, and I think the fat thing could have been a whole lot worse. But it still made me uncomfortable.
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Oh, and I didn’t get “Japanese” from the cleaning bot at all, either.
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I think this post is my favorite on the subject. I do think there has to be a balance between “omg fat consumerism” and “uh, they are ARE in space for way too long and lack of gravity gives you issues” when talking about this movie.
Loved the captain. Though realistically once human beings have hit the point that they have in this movie, I don’t think they would even be ABLE to manage self-care in regular gravity, much less clean up the planet in any way. I kinda wish they hadn’t gone there either.
That said, yeah, once again no non-white people = disturbing. Sigh.
I had no idea “Mo” was Japanese. (Heck, I thought the character name was “Mop.”)
And really, why isn’t this called “Wall-E and Eve” or “Eve?”
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July 8th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I went to see it again last night and the funny thing is that there are a lot of brown people in the movie; nine out of ten may be a whiter shade of pale, but I’d wager that at least one in ten sports dark skin. There’s even at least one scene in which two brown people are on-screen at the same time! The one female captain appears to be of Asian descent, and I believe there’s a man of colour who captained once as well (although I could be mistaken here). And of the infants shown, I think at least a third of them are brown. (I’m still not sure how these infants have come about, since it’s clear that the adults never leave their hoverchairs …)
The problem is that this only works in mid-length shots - when they’re doing long-range shots and panoramics, everybody’s pretty much white. Which rather undoes all of their attempts at diversifying their human cast. Like you, I really wish the movie had been less about the fate of humanity and more about the ‘bots … but overall it was a very enjoyable film.
You’ve gotta wonder though, with all the anti-capitalism messages littered throughout the film - do they want us to, er, procure it through less trash-creating methods? I mean DVDs, you know, they come with all that plastic and stuff. Hmm.
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July 8th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
My impression was that the Axiom was the flagship– the upper-class ship, since people paid to come– from an American city, probably New York but who knows (I can’t figure out skylines even when they’re not made out of trash). There are other ships, but no, the entire population did not make it off unless the entire world hit consumer dystopia before post-consumer waste dystopia– if the entire world was a BuyNLarge customer, which I’d maybe accept with the whole Global CEO thing, then the entire world might have gone on– leave no customer behind.
Mo… okay, Kate, the friend I saw it with, and I agreed that Mo is kind of Japanese. Smaller, with rectangular eyes, bows, tiny and clean-y and fussy. I may have been seeing something in nothing, though.
As far as the plots go, I liked that the humans had their plots– captain vs Otto, J* and Mary figuring out that there’s a world– and the robots had their two plots, and then Eeva’s one. Eeva does not save the poor beaten-up plant because it’s the right thing to do, or even because that’s what she’s been programmed to do– she fights her programming to stay with WallE. She saves the plant because that will send the ship to Earth, and Earth is where the spare parts are. None of the robots care about the humans beyond what they are programmed to.
It was such a good movie. It kind of sucks, because I think a lot of our instinct with good movies is to rip them apart and see how they could be better– more diverse, not as much gender crap, &c. I don’t know anyone who does that with bad movies. Good movies are like bright kids– they’re always being told that they could do better if only they really tried.
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July 8th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The fat was done in a way that did not immediately ping. But it was very much equated with fat=lazy=blob=nothing=garbage. Fat makes garbage fat is garbage. Take a bunch of kids to see this, and a bunch of kids to see an old John Candy movie filled with fat jokes, and I’ll bet the more fat kids get beaten up after Wall-E than after the John Candy movie.
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July 8th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Great post and thanks for the link.
In addition to the gender post you mention, I wrote an ealier post about what I saw as the problematic heternormative romance script of the preview entitled “What if the future were populated by trangender queer robots?” See the post here.
In regards to race, I was glad to see there were POC represented. But, as you pointed out, no speaking parts. It did look like the in the pictures of past Axiom captains that adorned the wall, there was one WOC captain.
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July 9th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Point of geekery: In space, you can simulate gravity inside a rotating cylinder—if you’ve ever ridden a Gravitron, it’s the same principle. Peak load is more important than average load for building strength and bone mass, so I’d think that 10-15 minutes per day of moderate activity under acceleration greater than 1 g (1.5 g, maybe?) would serve to keep people in decent shape. If we were ever actually to abandon Earth for any extended period of time, someone would surely think of this.
By the way, I haven’t seen the movie myself, but why would a Japanese cleaning robot be offensive? I can see people taking offense at a Mexican cleanbot, but AFAIK there are no stereotypes regarding Japanese cleaning service workers. It actually strikes me as somewhat counterstereotypical.
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July 9th, 2008 at 3:40 am
Re bone density and fat in space…I might have this wrong, but doesn’t living in space require more caloric consumption to maintain weight than living on earth? I seem to remember something about how the astronauts had to get 3000 Calories a day. Also if the humans are stuck in space for any length of time, do they really have the extra food to allow everyone to get fat? Wouldn’t they be restricting food and therefore have only a few people able to maintain actual obesity? (At which point, of course, fat would be highly sexy.) Where are they even getting the food? And, yeah, there’s no way they’d be able to stand, muchless walk on earth initially. A few weeks in space leaves people in need of rehab. Years would be out of the question. Maybe the movie could have ended with people happily living in space and the robots happily living on earth, maybe trading with the humans or something.
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July 9th, 2008 at 5:22 am
As we walked out of the theatre, I said to my friend, “Okay, ignore the science. Other than that….”
I don’t think that Mo’s suggested race/nationality is necessarily offensive, but it’s interesting that I picked up on it. I seem to be the only one, so it may be something in me to poke at rather than something in the movie.
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July 9th, 2008 at 7:04 am
I swear Masheka and I had all the exact same quibbles as you with the movie. Bone loss in space is a classic sci-fi convention, but it generally requires that the ship in question have low or zero gravity (which I’m not certain was what was shown)… and it certainly can’t be combated just by TRYING to stand up. So the bone loss thing gets lost and it becomes about what they ate. Also, what was up with the little plant falling into the vacuum of space and NOT DYING?
You’re right that it’s not as anti-fat as it could be–the human characters are nice/cute, and there’s a romance that goes on… but still, the entire second half of the movie relies on the audience’s fear of becoming fat, no? And there are a lot of visual jokes about their fatness (like when they roll down the tilting spaceship).
The race thing is disgustingly typical in Pixar movies. Even Frozone in the Incredibles was just a sidekick, the classic “black best pal” to a white main character. But at least he got a speaking part, unlike the people of color in Wall-E.
Finally, I saw a lot of similarities with the movie Idiocracy–the giant corporation taking over the world and turning it into a shitty pile of garbage, people being encouraged just to sit in recliners and sip all their food from cups, etc.
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July 9th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I actually didn’t find the Walle-E and Eve physical appearances to be gender based. I actually thought they were going for an “interracial relationship” angle. Eve is sleek and white like a Mac, while Wall-E actually makes the Windows ding when he starts up. I thought it was actually quite a clever angle
This comment was written by Molly.Overall, I thought the movie was outstanding
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July 9th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I loved this movie to death, but I do understand why these issues are being brought up. It is possible to enjoy something, but you should also be aware of the rhetoric being used so you’re not brainwashed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the robots being gendered, and I’ve been trying to think about how you can make robots un-gendered, and I just can’t think of how to do it! I mean, even without obvious signs like pink or blue or something, is it possible to make an androgynous robot. Anything I can think of always seems male, and now my head hurts. Is anyone else having this problem??
And I think the thing with the captains was just supposed to illustrate the change in body types over the last 700 years, and though the movie is very “white” I think this instance it’s just the body thing.
Anyway, can anyone explain the Japanese robot thing? I thought at first it was a Monk joke, cuz I thought he (?) said his name was Monk, especially since he’s the cleaning almost OCD robot.
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July 9th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
“Eve is sleek and white like a Mac, while Wall-E actually makes the Windows ding when he starts up.”
Didn’t he make the Mac ding?
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July 9th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Diatryma: “It was such a good movie. It kind of sucks, because I think a lot of our instinct with good movies is to rip them apart and see how they could be better– more diverse, not as much gender crap, &c. I don’t know anyone who does that with bad movies. ”
Ever hear of MST3K?
Here’s an example of a bad flick with 80 mostly critical commenters: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/freaky-flickers#comments
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July 9th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Yes. I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I’ve heard enough about it to know that there was much product placement put in it by Steve Jobs, who’s majority shareholder of Disney and used to own Pixar, I believe. Wall-E sounds like a Mac, and Eve is basically an iPod with blue eyes.
Bad movies make good on their promise to entertain you, if only because penning a scathing review afterwards is such mean-spirited fun.
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July 10th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Wall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80’s style
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July 10th, 2008 at 10:17 am
I sent the link to this article to several of my liberal professors who also saw and loved the movie, and one pointed out that if people didn’t analyze the hell out of pop culture, many intellectuals would be out of a job. LOL. And I must say I’m more offended by the lady transformer. Seriously, does she have to be pink?? And despite what the other blog says, it does appear that her breasts are the headlights. I also can’t help but notice that she’s a dainty motorcycle (not even a cool one like a harley). Why can’t she be a hulking semi, or would that emasculate too many fans??
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July 10th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Hmmm, I always thought it was the Windows ding but I could be wrong. I have a Macbook though and I didn’t recognize the ding. The Mac product placement wouldn’t surprise me; Pixar is Steve Jobs baby and corporations love to put their products into as many things as possible. Since so many people are ignoring conventional commercials, people are putting their stuff out there in films and television. Its irritating ant tacky as hell
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July 13th, 2008 at 8:26 am
I had high hopes of this movie when Wall-E got shot off into space in the exploding pod, but, dammit, he didn’t blow up. Gad, I hate romances.
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July 13th, 2008 at 11:47 am
[...] haven’t posted a link to Alas, A Blog in a long time, but Ampersand has a great write up on WALL-E with an interesting take on if the depiction of humanity in WALL-E is making fun of fat [...]
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July 13th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I assumed the “bone loss” thing was a bit of a joke, actually. Just something less insulting to say than, “Well, you’ve all become lazy and obese, so…”
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July 13th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Just saw it. Wow. Probably Pixar’s best yet, though I’ve always been partial to Ratatouille.
I laughed when I heard Wall-E’s startup sound, especially that last time at the end when it happened in the middle of a very tense situation. (Won’t say more, spoiler alert.)
I’m not a bear on this whole product placement thing - if advertising provides money to make a better movie or whatnot, then all power to it. Corporations have all that money, might as well make themselves useful. I remember reading a firebrand article about how Phillip Morris (a cigarette company, for you non-smokers) sponsored a good portion of art in New York City, and I completely failed to share in the author’s outrage.
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July 13th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I assumed the “bone loss” thing was a bit of a joke, actually.
Hmmm…sort of the opposite of the “I’m not fat I’m big boned” joke?
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July 14th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I enjoyed this movie, but regardless I felt like sexual stereotypes were overwhelmingly evident.
Eve… I mean, really EVE? Original woman? Then we have the fact that she resembles an egg. She is on the search for plant life which once she finds she places inside her, like an artificial womb. She is also of course, initially hostile, firing off a gun at everything! (I said to the guy I’m seeing, how come she is outfitted with a gun- none of the other robots are!) AND then in some ways she is also the “professional woman,” no time for love, she has her “mission” a.k.a. work project that she cannot get distracted from.
http://www.pheaked.wordpress.com
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July 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am
On WALL-E< humans, and fatness, here’s what the director had to say:
You could blame consumerism as one thing that’s happening in this film, but there’s a million other things we do that distract us from connecting to the person next to us and from furthering relationships, which is truly the point of living. …
I wasn’t trying to make the humans into fat, lazy consumers, but to make humanity appear to be completely consumed by everything that can distract you—to the point where they lost connection with each other, even though they’re right next to each other. The reason I made them look like big babies was because a NASA guy told me that they haven’t yet simulated gravity perfectly for long-term residency in space. And if they don’t get it just right, atrophy kicks in and you begin to lose your muscle tone—you just turn into a blob of goo. For a while, that’s what I did with the humans in the movie; they were just big blobs of Jell-O. But it was so bizarre, we had to pull it back. So I said, well, let’s just make them look like big babies. That’s where all that came from.
I wasn’t trying to make some sort of mean-spirited comment on consumerism or today’s society. I was going with just the logic of what would happen if you were in a perpetual vacation with no real purpose in life. So I went with the idea that we’d become sort of big babies with no reason to grow up. I definitely saw humanity as victims of this system that they were in. They were just big babies that needed to stand on their own two feet.
The people of the Axiom are fat because of two things: 700 years of life in space has done this to them gradually over time (you see this during te shot in Captain McCrea’s room when it pans a line of of the various Axiom captains over the generations.) This damage, combined with their inactivity, has caused them to not only be fat, but limited in their mobility. It is clear, however, that this is not directly “their fault.”
There is another factor, too. This film borrows heavily from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 2001, the astronauts are kept ignorant of critical aspects of thier mission by HAL– and the Autopilot, who also borrows heavily from influences from HAL does the same thing… until EVE comes back with the plant, Captain McCrea isn’t aware that they’re on more than just a greatly-extended cruise.
There are lots of allusions to the fact that the ships computer and BNL propaganda bombard and distract everyone.’
There is a really good analysis of WALL-E and fatness here:
http://men-in-full.livejournal.com/38608.html
I really didn’t see the movie as anti-fat, more like anti-complacency.
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July 16th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
She is also of course, initially hostile, firing off a gun at everything!
Yeah, I didn’t get Eve’s behavior. Directive: look for signs of plant life and return it to the Axiom (but if a rock clatters somewhere near you, shoot the hell out of the entire area) ?? The overly cautious way the landing ship released her reminded me of Hannibal Lector being prepared for transport. Didn’t make sense for an environmental survey robot.
But I believe everything makes sense, if only you know the reason (or can imagine a reason). I imagine that the Eve’s were part of the original mission charter with isolated tamper-proof programming (that’s why she obeyed the captain and not Otto) Perhaps her touchy trigger switch was because there was an actual threat that her mission could be interfered with. Back in the day when the Axiom was launched there could have been rival nations or eco-terrorist fanatics left behind, who would have done anything to prevent the decadent B&L consumer elite from returning to a recovering Earth, including scrapping their probes.
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July 17th, 2008 at 7:34 am
The humans stand up at the end of the movie because the red string of the plot is yanking them, not because it’s at all plausible. The humans return to agrarianism at the end of the movie because it serves the theme of taking back control of their destiny, which they’d given up, not because it’s at all plausible.
The honest trajectory of the plot would not have involved humans triumphing over machines, or even wanting to go back home. Or, if they’d attempted to return to Earth, it would have looked like Heinlein’s “It’s Great to Be Back!”.
Every bit of the story in the first portion of the movie screams that humans’ control over their destiny is ended, that they’ve entered a period of species-wide senescence, and the future belongs to their mechanical offspring. Because this is unlikely to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside, the story veers away from its logical conclusion.
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July 17th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Well said
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August 4th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Regarding race : there are thousands of ships which left Earth, Axiom is just one of them, and obviously one which left from North America. So not so many Asians. And by the way what happened to the other ships.
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August 30th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
(There might be spoilers in this comment) OK I’ve just seen WALL-e and I loved it. If I was a kid I”d probably wanna buy a shopping kart of WALL-e memorabilia because I was so impressed by what I have seen. Words cannot sum up how much I enjoyed it. Sadly I am an adult who likes to spoil all the joy that my younger side felt and tries to find hidden messages or plot mistakes to ruin everything.
Regarding race: I was a bit shocked to see only white people on the ship but now that I think of it… all Pixar movies I have seen share this trait. I do not recall any people of color(and if there were any I am pretty sure they didn’t have a major role in the story). If I would like to worsen this aspect I could say that life on the spaceship reflected what seems to be a decadent American culture. What happened to Asian culture? And watching those human blobs I couldn’t help but wonder: What happened to all the starving children in Africa? I didn’t see any people of African descent on the ship. Did they all just disappear?
All I can do to answer these questions is assume that there were colored people on the ship but they were in the background as someone else stated above. Also I must assume that this is an American ship and all the other countries flew in other regions of space. The kid in me wants to believe that everybody was alright.
Now about the fat jokes. I am not fat. Perhaps a bit big-boned. That is why I can’t be offended. However many viewers might not share my point of view. To this movie’s defense: those were the cutest animated people I have seen lately in an animated cartoon. If anyone out there feels insecure about their weight or feels offended by this movie’s depiction of chubby humans: please don’t be. The fact that the characters are so adorable just proves that a person’s weight has nothing to do with beauty. It’s only our modern society that tries to tell us what is and isn’t attractive that causes people to be so weight conscious.
On the gender issue: robots are genderless. Their character design along with their names made them seem as a heterosexual couple. Now the fact that two Robots have feelings of love for each other,to me , seems to make all the gender talks useless. Of course the animators depicted a traditional relationship(it’s a Disney movie) but the fact that robots share a feeling makes the message stronger than ever before. You can love somebody else no matter who they are, no matter how different you are from each other, even if you can’t start a family and even if all the others around you can’t understand the way you feel. If two robots which are completely incompatible and which have no reason to have feelings because there is no need for them to ensure their ’species’ survival can love each other, I see no reason why a Homosexual couple couldn’t do the same. Besides if we would attribute a gender to EVA or WALL-E you have to admit that there is a certain role reversal as opposed to other films. It’s not often you find such a strong and determined female character coupled with a shy and sensible male that is in constant need of her rescue.
Now as SF I’d like to say that there is more fiction than science in this movie. I appreciate all the Space Odyssey homages but I’d prefer to never put these two films in the same category. A scene that lingers in my mind is the throwing of huge blocks of garbage in outer space. The fact that recycling wasn’t used on Earth should be a good enough reason for maintaining the habit but I am just wondering: if this ship throws away all this junk where do they get resources for building new junk?
I believe that the makers of WALL-E tried too hard to incorporate too many themes in a single movie. In my mind there are two conflicting views: -It’s a masterpiece of story telling and animation OR -The most racist and poorly conceived SF movie I have seen in years
The truth is although there are so many things to criticize in this movie I have to take it the way it is. It’s a movie intended for kids that tries to also reach older audiences. And it does. It reached me because I could understand WALL-E’s loneliness. I could really relate to the little fellow. All those years alone made him cherish life and the presence of others around him. All that hard work that could have been pointless made more than just a difference: it changed the fate of mankind and robot kind alike. Even if the movie might have some unsolved issues regarding race, gender or weight problems the fact that it made people notice them or talk about them is a great thing. Just by making you aware of this stuff, since you can easily express your own ideas about it ( like most of you have done on this blog) makes it even more than worth while to watch.
PS: I got the idea of making a comment by reading the one about the Japanese Robot. I wish I could solve the mystery as to why somebody said it looked Japanese but I don’t think I can. the only thing that came to mind was the Wikipedia article on an Anime named my neighbor Totoro. . If you had watched the movie you would have seen a girl scrubbing floors in a weird manner similar to the one MO used. The article states that it is a passive cultural reference so I guess there might be some truth to the Japanese origin theory.
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September 25th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
[...] haven’t posted a link to Alas, A Blog in a long time, but Ampersand has a great write up on WALL-E with an interesting take on if the depiction of humanity in WALL-E is making fun of fat [...]
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