Fat! Lazy! Humans! Destroy the Earth: Wall-E does not compute
Warning! Deeply UNFORTUNATE Wall-E spoilers ahead!
If you haven’t already, do check out the open Kung Fu Panda thread over at Shapely Prose. I’d pretty much (sight unseen) written off the movie as good for little more than multiple Orientalist buzz word and Fat Hate bingos, but commenters have persuaded me that there is some definite baby steps value in there, since the main character ultimately doesn’t undertake a diet or weightloss regime to gain skill & the respect of his peers. I’m not exactly thrilled with the other things described (food used as motivation etc) in the thread, but I’m somewhat placated by the fact that it isn’t just another hour and fourty minutes of focused fat hate and mockery. I wish I could say the same for some of the other upcoming animated releases.
The early descriptions of Pixar’s upcoming summer release Wall-E are rather harrowing, to say the least.
Over on the thread linked to above Bekki mentioned that the “villains” of Wall-e (which my partner & I have been looking forward to since the first images of the little Johnny-5 esque robot were released… we say “Wall-e” to each other in the voice and everything, it’s really quite sad) take the form of (the ever so original and not hackneyed at all) Fat! American! Couch! Potatoes! I didn’t want to believe that Pixar, the folks behind last summer’s resplendent Ratatouille, a brilliant movie about the importance of nourishment and appearance not ultimately dictating a person’s (or rat’s) skills or passions, could be capable of perpetrating some sort of heinous obesity crisis storyline but it seems the ugly rumours are true:
“WALL-E indeed seems to be making a statement about fitness and the obesity crisis. ‘It shows a future in which mankind literally spends all day on a giant starship moving around in floating chairs, drinking liquified food from Big-Gulp-esque cups, and forever surfing (and chatting) on chair-mounted video screens,’ says the source.
A section of the film reveals the history of mankind’s fall into sloth and fat: ‘There’s an amazing sequence where the camera pans over portraits of the previous captains of the ship — and we watch as they slowly devolve into amorphous blobs with each successive generation. Will the lethargic humans re-awaken to their possibilities as people? I hate spoilers: you’ll have to see the movie to find out!’ “
The (cited) article over at calorielab (from back in October) goes on to say these early screenings the human characters hadn’t been fully rendered yet, so it’s not clear whether or not they will actually appear as Jabba the Hutt with arms and legs in the final cut of the film… Still this is so INCREDIBLY disappointing. I feel personally betrayed by Pixar right now.
UPDATE: Rachel at the F-Word, wrote about this way back in November and I encourage you to read her incisive and detailed analysis of how this sort of portrayal advances damaging fat stereotypes here & here. We pulled from the exact same article even, so I’m kind of stunned my google search for didn’t turn up her posts on the movie. Evidently my google-fu is failing me today. Thanks, Rachel for being so cordial! I personally feel like I should have been whacked with a clue-by-four on this one.
I blogged about this film last year with my concerns about what appears to be its blatant fat-bashing. You can read my archives here and here.
The posts attracted quite a number of trolls, rivaled only on my site by the Dan Savage loyalists. Pixar has quite the following of fans who will dearly defend their beloved animators regardless. I remember checking the IP of one troll and it came back to Pixar, so I know at least one person there is aware of the concerns of the fat community in relation to this film. He tried to object with claims that the people were fat and lazy because of the effects of space, but c’mon… is the average Disney viewer really going to think “Wow, so space makes people look like Jabba the Hut?” or are they going to think “Wow, so sloth and gluttony makes people look like Jabba the Hut - and destroys the environment, too!”
I knew someone had to have blogged this… Thank you so much for linking me to your incisive posts. As with any piece of media, trolls come out in force (I learned this when I blogged about the rampant misogyny of Sin City) to defend its right to be hateful until the end of time.
I was completely out of the loop on this, so I appreciate you and others clueing me in. I will amend the post to link directly to your blog entries as well. (I would have linked to you to begin with if I knew about your posts!)
Oh, no problem. Actually, I saw that the film is close to being released and I hoped someone would write about it from a fattist standpoint. I’m a little sick of trying to explain to fatphobes exactly why we find this so very offensive.
Arg, had a comment 2/3 done and then lost it.
I saw a screening tonight. I would say the character concept has changed from the October reference (and talking with the friend at Pixar who got me in, that is indeed the case - “we had some problems with the humans” in the initial concept, he said.)
Humans, at least the ones of 2700, are not the villains, and obesity is not the cause of the Earth’s demise (the people shown fleeing Earth in the past are all depicted as slim). It is consumption, and the trash produced by an endless array of consumable goods, that destroys the earth. While I wouldn’t say the portrayal that made it to screen is size-positive, the year 2700 humans are pretty friendly and supportive of WALL-E. There is even a brief scene with a newly-formed couple frolicking (fatly) in the pool, which is pretty flirtatious in a way I thought was charming.
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. There is a bit where one of the humans is knocked out of his floating chair and can’t get up without help, so he just flops around on the floor like a turtle on its back or a huge infant. That really sucks.
But I would say that I liked the film much more than I’d expected based on reading the warnings about it. And I am impressed that Pixar-owned-by-Disney can take what sounds like it was undoubtedly a totally offensive initial character concept, re-work it based on concerns about size-ism, and make an improvement, even if it’s not ultimately ideal. The friend whom I talked to is a fellow of size himself, and it was clear that he felt loyal to the film but also understood it could still have issues. I’m just glad to know the conversation is even happening inside a media company of this stature.