Thanks, I Hate It: Wall-E

Image caption reads: “Fat bulging over edge of ATMAT”

For about forty minutes, Wall-E is the story of a sad-cute robot roaming an endless wasteland of junk. It’s a good movie, more or less. The Dr. Seuss-esque towers of trash are whimsical and otherworldly, Wall-E’s lonely life heartstring-tuggingly adorable. There’s an inquisitive cockroach sidekick and a tender robot romance. There are a few odd notes—the live-action sequences in which Fred Willard speaks to a crowd about an impending ecological collapse is particularly jarring—but nothing bad enough to sink the simple, quiet charm of the premise.

And then there’s the next hour and twenty. Wall-E follows his flame EVA to a gigantic spaceship where the remnants of humanity live in coddled safety, their bloated, atrophied bodies oozing over the edges of their hover chairs as they zip around in a constant haze of indulgence and social media, stuffing their faces while ignoring everything around them. It’s this rampant consumerism, this individual gluttony that doomed the planet, the movie tells us, glibly skipping over the statistical insignificance of any non-corporate, non-governmental contributions to the poisoning of our planet. No, it’s not corporate greed but the weak-willed and overfed who are responsible for ruining our civilization.

More than anything it’s the cuteness of Wall-E’s helpless fat people that really burns me up. The portrayal is so infantilizing, so condescending, an endless series of adorable pratfalls and jokes about how useless fat bodies are. It’s hard not to see an ugly condemnation of the physically disabled as well in the feeble gestures and chairbound bodies of the film’s human characters Using a movie to teach children to see fat people as mindless eating machines lost in gratifying their own base desires ought to be punishable by a lifetime ban from making any kind of media a child could conceivably see. 

To return to Fred Willard, the movie’s decision to portray him alone as a live-action human being while the other human characters are blobby cartoon lumps of pudding is, of course, a stylistic choice and a tossed-off joke, but the undertones there are despicable to a degree few other movies manage to attain. If Willard, a straight-size man, is the only real human in the movie, then what are the fat people—the fat things, to keep faith with Wall-E’s tone? Their inhumanity is implicit, an unspoken part of the whole big, bright, hateful joke.