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Pixar vs. Fat People

Screen cap from the Wall-E trailer, since Pixar’s press photos include no images of the humans in the movie. Courtesy of Pixar


Finally, we’ve found people who don’t like Wall-E: fat people! The Post’s Lou Lumenick points out that some reviewers have described the movie’s vision of the future of the human race (trapped in a spaceship, obese, stuck in chairs, eating and mindlessly watching TV) as possibly offensive to the average moviegoer (trapped in a theater, obese, stuck in chairs, eating and mindlessly watching Wall-E). Lumenick discovers that body-image-conscious blogs have been worried about Wall-E since at least November, when the blog the F-Word questioned whether the movie was derogatory to the overweight.

So is it? We don’t know, as we won’t see the future Best Picture winner until this weekend. Based on what we do know, though, we do think some of the concerns of the F-Word (and Fatshionista, which ran a similar post earlier this month) are a little off base. Fat people don’t cause the destruction of Earth in Wall-E, and aren’t the villains of the movie; hundreds of years of life spent in zero-gravity space has caused the human race to be fat. But as the F-Word asks, will that make a difference to the average moviegoer, or will they just laugh at the fatties?

We’d like to think that Pixar will treat this as deftly as it’s treated previous sensitive issues in its movies, such as tragic toy-to-toy surgical grafting and anti-rodent discrimination in the kitchen. Surely we won’t find ourselves in the theater tomorrow night, feeling vaguely guilty as the audience screams with laughter during the moment when (as a Fatshionista commenter reveals) a totally fat guy falls off his chair and rolls around like a turtle on his back, right?

Wall-Mart Nation Finds ‘WALL-E’ No Laughing Matter As Very Nervous Mouse House Hides Fat Characters [NYP Movies blog via Defamer]
Pixar joins in on fat-bashing [The F-Word]
Fat! Lazy! Humans! Destroy the Earth: Wall-E does not compute [Fatshionista]

Pixar vs. Fat People