Fat and Not Afraid

I'm going to come right out at the beginning and say that I love the movie Wall*E.  The animation is crisp and engaging, the story is one I can really get behind and the characters all have a wonderful depth.

When Wall*E first came out, there was a lot posted about it in the Fatosphere because a lot of people took offense that the only humans in the film were fat.  Not only were they fat, they were all using to hover-chairs, drank/ate everything from a cup via straw and appeared to have absolutely no interest in the ship they lived on or the people on it.  Even the babies at the "All Day Care" were in little hover seats and red jumpers, pleasantly plump and with soothers in their mouths.  It appeared to be a very large, very pointed slap in the face to fat people everywhere, and I can completely understand why people would think that and understand where they're coming from. 

However, maybe because I love Pixar a little too much or maybe because I'm Canadian and less inundated with the OMG FATTIES R BAD!!! messages, I look at Wall*E a little differently.  This is my take, and your mileage may vary.  After 700 years on a spaceship in low gravity, the brief explanation given by the head of Buy and Large Corp doesn't hold a lot of water; if the entire ship's cargo of people had been experiencing zero-gravity for the last 700 years, severe atrophy and osteopenia (that's bone loss similar to osteoperosis) would have occured and the people on the ship would likely, by that point, have no skeleton at all.  But they didn't have zero-gravity, just the hoverchairs and low gravity environment , so the osteopenia is out.  One would also hope that the hoverchairs wouldn't have been SO popular at the beginning of the voyage that the atrophy experienced by those using them (essentially putting themselves on voluntary bedrest) that when it was noticed, it was treated with excersize.  The chairs are advertised by B&L for those with physical disabilities so "even grandma can join the fun!", so I can't really see everyone rushing to use them.  The ads for the voyage we see Wall*E wander by during the opening scenes of the movie show what we would normally see in an ad; healthy, fit looking people, not a bunch of listless, bored, fat folk.

All of that aside, what I really wanted to focus on was not how or why the people on the Axiom became the way they are, but how they're treated by the robots who run the ship.  In many ways, the people on the Axiom are treated like babies; their every need and desire taken care of.  There's no desire to learn or work, a complete atrophy of the body, mind and spirit.  The way the people are so wrapped up in their own needs and desires is JUST like that of a newborn; there's nothing there yet but satisfaction of personal need.  Even into the age of 2, a lot of kids don't want to interact WITH other kids, they want to hang out NEAR them but still do their own thing.  We see a lot of that in Wall*E.  There's basically no human interaction (which makes you wonder where the babies in the daycare came from) until two humans are influenced by Wall*E and reach out to each other, almost by accident.  To me, the people in Wall*E aren't horribly obese, stupid and lazy, they're infantilized by the robots and treated like babies for their entire lives.

I'd add more but someone is pulling at my arm to go play "Find the Animals"! which is much preferable to watching Eragon.