Discuss: Do Politics Belong in Kids Movies?

My first question is, who said WALL*E was a kids movie? It's appropriate for children to see, sure. After all, it is rated G. The fact of the matter is that it is easily Pixar's most adult-themed movie ever. WALL*E is cute and the kids love his adventure, but the meat of the story is about loneliness and love, two topics which are both (especially the latter) things children don't deal with as much as adults do. It's also worth nothing that Stanton's last Pixar flick, Finding Nemo, is as much about (or maybe even more about) Marlin learning to let go of his son and let him live his own life than it is about Nemo trying to escape a fish tank.

The "stay the course" comment fits into WALL*E perfectly. First off, it's a nautical term, and the latter half of the film takes place on a space ship. It only makes sense that the captain would be given an order to stay on the current heading. Secondly, it's perfectly appropriate for a "kids" film to make a political statement. It's going to go over their heads anyway. I don't know of many 12 year olds that are going to pick up on references to things their President said when they were under 10 years old. It's a line squarely for the film's adult audience. This is what movies are supposed to do. Good films move us, reflect on the world, and make us think about things. Wall*E does all of these, and it does them mostly without dialogue and better than 90% of films out there.

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Cartoons have had political references since the Bugs Bunny days. They go right over kids' heads. No harm, no foul. Now, whether this particular joke hurts the film (as Kyle Smith thought, before he saw it) is a matter of opinion. But for me it simply added one more layer of nuance to an already-complex film.

P.S. The only time anyone ever complains about the presence of politics in art is when they don't agree with the politics. I suspect if the film had made an anti-Hillary crack, Smith would have thought it was hilarious and wholly appropriate.

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maybe everyone is just reading into one particular comment from the movie. it's an animated feature, just sit back and enjoy it and leave the politics for after you've left the theater.

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I think these critics were over reacting to the line the way some left leaning critics went overboard highlighting it as some brilliant commentary. The film itself has an absurd premise that is pretty laughable. So it's silly to take the movie that seriously. It's better to just go along for the ride.

The problem I have with Hollywood is it is inhabited by an echo chamber of people who fixate on the cliche of the day and offer really dumb takes on it. If they really are bashing Bush, it's only going to date the film. Like if they were insulting Tricky Dick.

They also seem to have one narrow political slant which makes their opinions very trite because they come from people preaching to the converted and therefore sound like zealots to the unannointed.

So when I see such filmsI try not to let stuff like this annoy me, but I think its sad that people can't do intelligent commentary anymore. I mean, the earth becomes a garbage dump? With 20th century garbage no less.

Whatever. It's only a cartoon.

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I don't like the idea of saying "after all, it's only a cartoon" because that devalues the worth of animation (and by extension, the child audience). It's truly a groundbreaking art - first with Steamboat Willie and then with Toy Story, and I know Pixar is really aiming to take Animation to the next level of evolution. And with WALL-E, they're getting that much closer.

I also don't think we should dismiss children as active and engaged audience participants. I believe that the debate really centers on language. Adults call it politics; children don't. So for children, they see a futuristic film that refers to humanity's current consumption rate. Children see trash everywhere, so the idea of an Earth filled with trash is not foreign, and they don't call it politics. They don't consider
"going green" to be liberal (and really, why should it be considered that by adults?). It's simply realistic to them. Now, if Blade Runner were animated, then it becomes theory. I don't think children could fully understand the idea of a theoretical post-apocalypse (nevermind that's it's depressing). And the concept of utopia is quite overdone in children's movies. So what's the middleground for the two extremes? Trash. It's not about aliens or a nuclear holocaust, and it's not all white and pristine. It's a recognizable Earth.

But again, I don't think the argument lies in "Is this material too dark or heavy or 'adult' for children?" It's a silly argument, I think, because the message behind it is "take care of your home." And why would such a message be a bad thing? Kids need to learn, and where better to teach them (and warn them) than in children's movies?

It's not like Pixar is talking about gun control, abortion, or religion (but Happy Feet did walk a dangerous ground on that last issue).

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Wall-E is a thought-provoking film, and--considering the screening I saw had previews for such high-quality intellectual fare as "Beverly Hills Chihuahua"--I'm grateful to any animation studio that is open to the idea that their audience doesn't consist entirely of pants-on-head numbskulls who can't think of anything funnier than cross-dressing lemurs who like to move it... move it...

The environmental message was extremely subdued--and that's an achievement when you consider how important that message is to (not just) the plot. I'm sensitive to this sort of thing as well, but I never, not once, felt like the pro-green leanings of the film got in the way of its enjoyability, unlike a certain movie about penguins and their feet.

Consider the following:

Fred Willard was hardly a proxy for George W. Bush. He didn't look like him, talk like him, reference anything obvious (e.g., "nu-ku-lar"--more on "stay the course" below) or lampoon him. Nothing Willard did showed in any way that he was an incompetent leader, and I interpreted his final scene to mean that he stayed behind on Earth and died trying to clean things up--which strikes me as more heroic than anything else.

Second, they never say why or how the Earth became uninhabitable. It's all background information--we know that it is, we presume that it has something to do with BNL, but the rest is up to our imagination.

Last, as noted above, "stay the course" is a perfectly natural thing to tell a ship's captain who is about to alter his course--I don't believe it was intended to evoke Bush, or at least not to make fun of him. The context is all wrong. Willard wasn't saying that they should persist in a bad decision, he was telling them to not come back because it was too dangerous.

Be all that as it may, I'm on the fence about politics in kid's films. I would think that most children wouldn't be able to properly process political posits... so to speak... at least, not in a meaningful way. On the other hand, environmental stewardship is a fairly innocuous message--everyone, and I mean everyone, thinks that we need to keep from destroying the planet. There is simply a great deal of debate about the extent to which we are actually destroying it and the extent to which our planet-parenting should interfere with modern life. The only reason it feels timely is that the global warming debate has heated up substantially in the last few years--but Wall-E has almost certainly been in some form of development for that entire time.

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"the guilty man flees when no one pursues"...or whines about one line in a movie :p Its obvious Nolte and Smith feel uncomfortably guilty about something, to be so whiny about a line in a movie :p

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yes it's just like Beauty and the Beast when Gaston says you're either with us or against us...just throwing that out there.

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Good. Let's hope they did intend to bash Bush. Bush is a moron and not only the worst president, but perhaps the worst human our country has ever had (no offense to humans intended).

The Simpsons has a LONG history of making fun of people (especially right wing republican religious nuts), and let's not even start on South Park - and the movies made from those series were funny as hell. For people to watch a wonderful movie like Wall-E and pick one line that might - MIGHT - be a dig at our horrible leader, means that those few ridiculous a-clowns that still support Bush (I believe the latest polls put them at around 31%) have too much time on their hands and are just drawing attention to the fact that they are, well, ridiculous a-clowns.

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I really didn't see Wall-E as a political film. A glimpse into a dark future that our species' mass-consumption may inevitably lead us to has nothing to do with politics. That kind of thought about humanity's future is a staple of all good sci-fi since at least 2001. A great modern sci-fi frames a more person or human-based story with these kinds of social concerns which reflect a mirror on society. As for the Bush reference. Well, the line was so deeply set in a specific context that I actually didn't even pick up on it.

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Oh god... I'm having flashbacks to all the right wing loons saying that Happy Feet had a hidden gay agenda.

So laughable when these same people who bitch and moan about "hidden agendas" and what not, are all too happy to release their own agenda movies. Veggie Tales, endless bible stories turned into cartoons (after being whitewashed and sanitized).

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Sam,

And yet as a result of the Iraq war (which was totally based on lies and purposely misleading/faulty intelligence) thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. Republicans like you don't seem to care about that fact, and seem to want to defend Bush as 'well meaning' and write off those dead people as unimportant to your argument. Us 'liberals' meanwhile, actually care about those folks. Sorry....call me a softy, but I don't much like when our troops are killed; it sickens me that people like you thinks that's cool. Anyone who has spent any amount of time watching Bush's antics (from calling a reporter an a-hole in public, to giving the camera the finger as governor, to being drunk at a public function as governor, to mis-pronouncing half of the English language, to harming the environment, to favoring oil company's over the general public (as Exxon pulls in $10 billion in NET profit per quarter (PER QUARTER!!!), then says it can't afford additional refineries or to pay the poor fishermen who suffered from the Exxon Valdez spill) etc., etc.) know what a horrible person Bush is. The economy has been on a roller coaster for years (stock market is now at it's lowest in two years), gas prices are soaring, our troops are dying overseas, the world has a lower opinion of us than during any other presidency, global warming has accelerated to an alarming rate, food prices are rising, and you - YOU!!! - say that people like ME are to blame because we are dissatisfied with our fearless leader?!?!?! Get a clue, buddy. Anyone that has studied even the least bit of American politics and history knows that to question our leaders and voice our opinions is as patriotic as it gets. But dangerous people like you, Anne Coulture, Dick Cheney, and the myriad of other republican right wing nuts who say they want to squash their opponents like bugs and who write books that say the only good Democrat is a dead one, are the real danger to this country. I've actually seen bumper stickers from you nuts that say just that (the only good liberal is a dead one). Do you see us liberals saying that about you right wing crazies? No, and it wasn't until I started seeing the violent nature of you guys (on bumper stickers, on Fox News, from Anne Coulture, from Dick Cheney, from gun toting, nascar loving nuts, etc., etc) that I started to have such strong negative feelings about the state of affairs in this country. You guys are violent, negative, harmful people who like to attack liberals for supporting our freedoms and favoring peace over war. It is people like YOU that have put a horrible leader in office and kept him there despite every indication that he is a clueless diptard. So go on, Sam, put another gun rack in your pick up, slap on another bumper sticker that says you want to kill a liberal instead of a terrorist, and continue to attack peace loving folks for voicing their opinion. I'm just going to sit back and watch it all crash down around us like George Carlin would have wanted.

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I'm not sure the critics have thought this one through all the way. The reason that "stay the course" is such a ripe target for satire is that Bush repeated it so much that it became parody out of his own mouth. Stay the course, stay the course, stay the course, stay the course, stay the course...

And now surge!

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I'm not seeing a comment here by anyone referencing their own children and the impact of this film on them, so let me pass on our experience from last night.

As we left a 7PM showing, which was 70% adult, we heard a group of 20-somethings behind us talking up the film. At one point one said "Everyone over the age of 30 liked the film. This was not a movie for kids, it's too mature. Kids wouldn't understand it."

I have a 10 and a 12 year old. They got it. They even got the political reference. It made them enjoy the film more because it made reference to their reality. It enriched the fantasy for them in showing them how "universal" politics can be.

Anyone who thinks kids won't "get" a film because of any sort of political or social message it includes probably doesn't realize (or know) that these same kids are reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as part of their required summer reading, which my eldest just finished reading. My youngest understood that the BNL represented the natural progression of America's fascination with convenience culture making us obese and our addiction to being so plugged into media that we miss the world around us.

Kids get it. And that's probably what scares some conservative critics more than the actual "stay the course" message itself, because kids can comprehend when they are being lied to, they can understand nuance, they do get political jokes in kids films, and they aren't stupid. And when you make a movie for kids that sells their intelligence short what you end up with is a dull movie no one wants to watch.

Adults who think kids aren't that smart probably weren't that smart as kids themselves.

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