Slate’s Daniel Engber takes a whack, arguing that the film’s equation of overweight Americans with global destruction is incorrect:

The desire to link obesity and environmental collapse seems to have more to do with politics than science.

I suppose he makes his case, but it’s tangential to the film, I think. It’s a little willful to read the movie necessarily saying that overweight people cause environmental problems. Indeed, some people have said that Hitsville’s contention that the movie is a broadside on American food consumption is wrong because the people on the spaceship have become blobs only in their exile.

Two, I think he’s underappreciating how unusual the bluntness of the societal critiques in the film are. Taken individually, it’s hard to argue with the points. Americans are overweight. Companies do foist unnecessary trash on the culture and don’t take responsibility (or have not been forced to take responsibility) for, more obviously, the recycling of dangerous materials. (They also exercise political muscle to squelch social attempts to make them.) The film is careful to make plain both sides are complicit.

And G-rated movies are, as a rule, a little more … sympathetic to the concerns of large companies, I think it’s fair to say. I don’t agree with all of Pixar’s critiques. The Incredibles, for example, had a preposterous (and fairly right-wing) framing trope*. But it’s hard to gainsay what Pixar pulled off in this instance.

p.s. And anyway, Hitsville’s main concern isn’t with the film at all. It’s that critics didn’t bother to consider the political implications of its tropes. 

p.p.s. Engber ends his piece with this poignant scene:

What happens when the movie ends and the lights come up? Does the rest of the audience stare at the lone fatty as she waddles her way toward the theater doors? Do they see in her body a validation of the film’s “darker implications”—a signpost for what we might become if we don’t change our ways? Or do they just scowl at her, convinced that she’s part of the problem?

I would like to note again that this is a somewhat sensitive issue and repeat what I’ve said in previous posts: That I don’t want to make individual judgments about folks’ lifestyles. That said, the picture Engber presents in that graf is a bigger carton that Wall-E is. We’re not talking about a “lone” person. Wall-E’s ferocity comes from the way it essentially holds a mirror up to its audience.

* If I remember correctly, Father Incredible is driven out of the superhero business in the face of lawsuits stemming from one of his heroic rescues. You can read this is a clever sendup of the nonsensicality of the plotting in the superhero genre generally, but it has a far greater resonance in terms of the right-wing talking points about abuses of the legal system.

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Previously in Hitsville:

The “Wall-E” debate continues: The far right attacks!

The critical conundrum of “Wall-E” 

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