Opinion: Pixar’s Wall-E
Everyone seems to have an opinion on Wall-E. While Pixar’s latest release debuted at No. 1, this weekend, earning $65 million at the box office and is being hailed by critics with a whopping 97 percent “Fresh” rating, there is serious rancor from the right.
For those not familiar with the story, the film portrays a lonely robot’s quest for love, as he is left to clean up a trashed earth. Meanwhile, the over-indulged humans wait it out aboard gigantic spaceships run by a monolithic corporation-turned-government that “resemble spas for the fat and lazy.”
Would love to hear what you think, particularly after you take a glance at what the righteously right are saying: … MORE…
Two denizens of National Review Greg Pollowitz and Shannen Coffin think Pixar’s latest is a bit of “leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind,” as Coffin puts it.
“It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment,” Pollowitz writes at Planet Gore, National Review’s global-warming blog.
“I have been a huge fan of Disney Pixar’s movies,” Coffin writes at The Corner, the magazine’s staff blog. “Parents are usually just as entertained as their kids are. With WALL-E, that’s probably true only if you thought ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was Oscar-worthy.”
Blogland moves at the speed of thought, however, and already the right-wing backlash to the right-wing backlash against “Wall-E” is underway. Jonah Goldberg chimes in with a brief rebuttal at The Corner. He calls “Wall-E” a “fascinating and at-times brilliant movie.”
Goldberg, however, agrees with the critique that “Wall-E” is a bit of “Malthusian fear mongering” from Pixar. Two other bloggers go further and mount a conservative defense of the film.
“I was relieved to see a kids’ movie in which the obligatory message of ecological apocalypse is framed in terms of jeopardizing our own humanity, rather than being mean to poor Gaia,” writes Matt Frost at The American Scene.
Robert Patrick J. Ford of The American Conservative suggests that “Wall-E” is, Coffin’s protests notwithstanding, more right-wing than left-wing. “The real tragedy of these callous conservative critics (say that three times fast) is that they are missing the real lessons of the movie, ones I found immediately attractive to a traditional conservative,” Ford writes. “In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided its citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall.” He continues:
Another lesson missed is portrayed perfectly in Coffin’s claim that WALL-E points out the “evils of mankind.” The only evils of mankind portrayed are those that come about from losing touch with our own humanity. Staples of small-town conservative life such as the small farm, the “atomic family,” and old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment like “Hello, Dolly” are looked upon by the suddenly awakened humans as beautiful and desirable. By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice.
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