 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
In the lead-up to the release, however, I've been considering the titles that I wouldn't want to show my daughters. Every time I do so, there is one film that tops the list: WALL-E.
For those who haven't watched the movie, a quick synopsis might raise some confusion about this. For starters, its protagonist is an awkward, anxious, and adorable robot — and who among us isn't a sucker for a lovable droid?
Through WALL-E, who has been built to help clean up the world, the film tackles the global waste crisis. We learn that Earth is wholly inundated with trash, largely as a result of the mega corp Buy N Large, which produced just about every possible product, and encouraged people to buy just about every possible product, in astounding quantities. As a result of human beings living really unsustainably and covering everything in junk, toxicity levels rise and the planet becomes uninhabitable. Everyone has to move to outer space to save the species.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
Here's what isn't necessary, though: equating the downfall of humanity to fatness.
Thirty-seven minutes into the movie, we see human beings for the first time (until this moment, the story has focused on WALL-E and another droid called Eve). Two men fly past the screen in hovercrafts. They are chatting via a holographic tablet that appears directly in front of their faces. This way, they don't actually have to move those faces to speak to one another directly.
The characters are fat.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
All of these characters are fat as well.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
Unsurprisingly, he too is fat. Everyone is fat.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
The message is clear: These people have "let themselves go" in much the same way as they let the planet go. It might have been their ancestors who were responsible for the destruction of Earth, but their wastefulnesses, gluttony, and superficiality (framed through the size of their bodies, their addiction to technology, their inability to read or write, and their general complacency) have been inherited from the actual culprits.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
When every single human character in a movie is fat, it's obviously been an intentional choice. In the case of WALL-E, it is an undeniably fat-phobic choice. WALL-E's fat-shaming is a little different to the norm, however, because there is no single verbal fat joke. No one berates anyone else's "cheese thighs." No one moos or oinks at a fat woman walking down the street. No one uses terms like "blimp" or "whale." No one bullies anyone else at all.
With its striking visuals, what the story does, instead, is correlate fatness (and subsequently fat people) to the death of the planet and de-evolution of the species. In its depiction of all fat people as wasteful, inactive, superficial, and generally lacking in intelligence, WALL-E reinforces stereotypes that already exist in the actual world without ever needing to vocalize those stereotypes.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
There are no depictions of parenting in WALL-E, but we do see a group of chubby babies in front of a screen. They're in hovercrafts, too. How they were born, I do not know (given we're led to believe humans have become disinterested in, if not entirely incapable of, any form of physical activity). What I do know is that they are parentless; nurtured only by another screen.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
This is not the kind of message I want to pass down to my daughters. Some might argue that children are too young to put all of this together. Some will say kids are more interested WALL-E himself than in the humans around him. As someone who was fat throughout much of childhood, however, I simply don't believe this is the case. I know this movie would have further ingrained the ideals that were already causing me so much self-hatred. Even if I didn't process it as such at the time, it would have been yet another voice ridiculing, and underestimating, people like me.
 |
| Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures |
WALL-E may not feature any verbal fat jokes, but it is the perpetuation of this narrative that makes it so dangerous.