Wall-E

Ashia R:

For family movie night his weekend, we watched Wall-E.

I keep feeling this…nervousness, about the depiction of all humans as fat from inactivity.

Because of course we don’t just become fat out of laziness or forgetting to move. But then – there are so many other ‘obviously it wouldn’t really be like that’ issues with the frame of the story. It’s so divorced from reality it’s hard to grab an anchor to tie it to real life depictions of size discrimination.

So here goes!

I wish they hadn’t use fattness as a visual metaphor for growing weak and complacent and dependent on technology.

(But I do LOVE that the people are all kind, brave, curious, and hardworking as soon as they get even a tiny opportunity to be so – when so typically we see fat characters become rude, mean, and worthless as if fat cells ruin our brains.)

So we’re going to continue that conversation – about the realities that sure – we do tend to gain weight when we are inactive. We are watching more screens and having to fight off distractions from the attention economy and it’s taking a toll on our health. But that toll on our health isn’t correlated with our body size, is not correlated with complacency and laziness. The writers of this story were wrong for depicting it that way.

What kinds of messages are we absorbing from the movie in terms of equating body size with compliance and consumerism?

The animators exploited stigma against fat folks for cheap laughs. Which is such a disappointment in a movie so witty and sweet and awesome.

Thoughts?