This summer, I have managed to land myself one of the easiest, most enjoyable jobs imaginable: taking care of two bright, fun young girls. Our daily activities include swimming, eating, reading, watching Disney movies, mall-hopping, and the occasional trip to the movies. It is the latter of these that has inspired this week’s column. I have not been so angry in a very long time.
Surely you’ve seen at least the latest previews for the Disney-Pixar film “Wall-E”, the story of a little trash-compacting robot searching for love. I took the girls to see it the day it came out because honestly, I was pretty excited about it. I’ve always loved Pixar films. I laughed and smiled and squealed in a girly fashion as Wall-E fell in love with the robot Eve and warmed the hearts (or mechanical parts) of all those he encountered. There was more to the movie than just a cute little robot and an awkward romance. There was a powerful environmental message contained in the happy plot: stop destroying earth before we’re forced to leave it.
Humans in the movie are depicted as fat, lazy, and oblivious to everything beyond the screen in front of their faces. They glide through a giant spaceship on rolling chairs and are given everything they need without having to lift more than a finger by a company called Buy-N-Large.
Now, I’m a fairly intelligent girl. Morgan Stewart, who accompanied the girls and I to the movie, is a very well-informed and intelligent person also. We both understood the movie’s message and even caught the possible stab at large corporations, but neither of us thought, “Hey! Those liberals are trying to warn us of the dangers of large corporations and present paranoid propaganda to young children! Shame! Shame on the Malthusians!” Nope. Didn’t think anything of the sort. We thought, “Hey, this is a good lesson, right? Take care of the earth!” Simple? Apparently not. Critics and politicians and conservatives in general are condemning Wall-E, saying that it flings unfair and unexpected propaganda at young children, invading their young and impressionable minds with liberal paranoia.
I asked my two girls what they got from the movie. These are two intelligent, pre-teen girls. Middle school-aged. They both said the same thing I did… that we should take care of the earth. If that’s all they took from the movie, how can younger children be expected to understand what Disney may or may not have been saying about large corporations?
Of course, Morgan Stewart felt that these critics were being as ridiculous as I thought they were. He said, “If it's a part of the "Liberal Agenda" to care about the environment and the state of our world at large, paint me paranoid and crazy, I'd rather be labeled a nut than to think like one.”
The point is, a children’s movie should be allowed to send a simple message without being called propaganda. If adults take more from Wall-E than a simple environmental message than so be it. A child is not going to see the red spacesuits worn by the humans in the movie and think, “Communism!” If that’s what a parents thinks, then that’s their own problem. They’re old enough to think for themselves.
Come on guys, leave the sweet little robot movie alone. Don’t you have better things to do than berate Disney-Pixar for wanting to make the earth a little cleaner? Seems harmless to me. Last I checked, 8-year-olds don’t think that big corporations are the root of all the problems they barely know about, and they’re certainly not going to assume that from a movie about a little robot who likes musicals and just wants to fall in love. Find something better to do, you stupid people.
-Geenuhjay@yahoo.com
