Lots of comments on and criticism of Hitsville’s post on how most mainstream (which is to say, hard-copy) film reviewers didn’t pay much attention to the social politics of Wall-E, the latest Pixar film.

(What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice?)

Comments here. Observations:

1) I noted that a few serious reviewers did mention, for example, the tableaux of human corpulence in the last half of the film. (n.b.: Here as before, I want to disassociate myself from making fun of overweight folks per se; but I think it’s fair for social commentators to take the issue on without being judgmental in the individual sense.) (n.b.b.: This does not apply to SUV drivers, however.) Sean O’Connell comments that I missed this comment from Variety:

“One can’t help but speculate about the perverse prospect of plus-sized multiplexers laughing while digging into their popcorn and slurping their sodas.”

That insight is a testament to the overall quality of Variety’s reviews, but it still qualifies as little more than a passing mention. As I responded in one of my comments, we hear constantly about the degradation of culture these days. But here’s a case where a work of pop culture is built around a transparently discernible social broadside of no little irony. More reviews should have taken explicit note of it—specifically (as the NYT and Variety but not too many others did, and again I’m talking here about mainstream print reviewers, not bloggers) the fact that the future didn’t look too much different from a typical movie-theater crowd.

2) Anne Thompson in her Risky Business blog has this to say:

Meanwhile, Hitsville runs down various critics who are are avoiding dealing with what happens to the human race in Wall-E. Bill Wyman seems to be missing the fact that some critics decided to keep back some of the reveals in the last part of the movie. What happens to humans in Wall-E was a big surprise when I saw the movie; I didn’t know that part of the story, so I was delighted and amazed by much of what I was seeing.

O’Connell makes a point similar to Thompson’s:

Consider this. Maybe critics were protecting some of the film’s second-half secrets? Virtually all of WALL-E’s promo material (trailers, commercials, etc.) reveal the scorched-Earth first act. Because the social commentary arrived once on the Axiom, maybe some critics wanted to leave a lot of that to be discovered by opening-week audiences?

I’m sure more articles will surface with deeper discussions of Pixar’s political and social statements in WALL-E. I, for one, didn’t want to let too many cats out of this overstuffed bag. I wonder if others writing about the film felt the same way.

(He’s referring to his review of Wall-E at filmcritic.com, which is here.)

That’s a fair point but it also is a bit convenient. (“I didn’t want to really get into all the prison stuff in The Gulag Archipelago because it gave away too much of the plot.”) It’s a reviewer’s job to take on the meaning of the film. I’m more radical about this than most people; critics should have something interesting to say and the chops to say it with, and that is where their responsibilities to audience or artist end.

Sometimes criticism involves discussing the plot in detail, and the internets spoiler police can bite me.

I’d argue, though, that the phenomenon I discuss in my original post hasn’t really anything to do with this. Many reviewers mentioned the portrayal of humanity; they just didn’t bother to take five seconds to think about it or engage with the ideas (too much of the time critics make references to “themes” or “ideas” in films and then never explain what they are), or if they did they didn’t want to make their audience uncomfortable.

3) O’Connell and Thompson are seconded, with vigor, by Lou Lumenick, film critic of the NY Post:

What a self-serving crock. Any careful check would reveal lots of critics, including me, who didn’t “ignore” the fat people/Wall-Mart angle. Anyone who suggests this should have been in the lead in reviews in mainstream papers doesn’t understand the function of movie reviews.

I didn’t give the Post the time of day in my original survey of the reviews, which was a mistake; Lumenick, in his take in the paper, stresses the film’s dark side as few other daily critics did:

Every time I think the studio that gave us “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” can’t possibly top itself, Pixar comes up with a masterpiece like “WALL-E,” which smuggles barbed political satire into a charming, hilarious robot love story aimed at the entire family.

Arguably the darkest animated feature ever released by Disney (after “Pinocchio”) and certainly the most political, “WALL-E” presents a bleak and brilliantly detailed vision of the future that puts most post-apocalyptic live-action movies to shame.

Later he takes on the implications of the film’s message as well:

This is a hugely ambitious theme for a G-rated family flick, and “WALL-E” takes risks that must have given Pixar’s consumer-oriented corporate overlords at Disney pause.

Foremost is a Swiftian take on the future of the Wal-Mart nation (no, I don’t think the movie’s title is a coincidence), where everyone has grown hugely fat and lazy, literally unable to walk as they pass their days in a semi-catatonic state at a resort/shopping mall aboard the spaceship.

(He’s also the only critic I noticed who forwent the clumsy Chaplin comparisons of Wall-E’s first forty or so minutes for the much-more-revealing reference to Tati, whose balletic and blithe wordless choreographies are the obvious inspiration for Andrew Stanton’s in Wall-E.)

4) Still, I stand by my original point: Wall-E will be remembered for a caustic worldview the implications of which few of the first-line mainstream reviewers addressed. It should have been in the ledes. Finally, I think this is true as well: If, for whatever reason, Pixar had decided to base its publicity campaign around the social satire issues in Wall-E—if the EPKs and junkets had featured Stanton ruminating on the themes of the film—it would have been in the lede of every review.