conservative bias Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Over at Moviefone's Inside Movies blog, a lively discussion is going on about animated family films. Jason Newman is concerned that many recent movies like Wall-E, Battle for Terra and the upcoming Astro Boy may be presenting young audiences with a hidden left-wing agenda.

I've watched a fair number of children's films for someone who has no kids of her own, and I'm not seeing the "blatant socialist themes" to the extent Newman is. For one thing, I disagree about Wall-E. Saying that Wall-E promotes liberalism is insulting to conservatives, as though they are the equivalent of the slothful humans on the spacecraft. "Don't be wasteful" isn't a liberal agenda, it's something most parents try to teach their kids. Astro Boy won't be in theaters until Oct. 23, so I can't say if it really contains "Marxist" themes and story elements. However, Newman says these story elements are played for laughs, and it strikes me that laughing at Communism is traditionally a right-wing practice.

A couple of people have been griping about Wall-E director Andrew Stanton's refusal to admit that his cute little movie about a robot in love actually contains some pretty upfront green politics, but there's a far more polarizing reference in the film than its harmless pro-environment agenda. It's no major plot spoiler to reveal that, about an hour or so into the story, Fred Willard appears in a recorded message as the mysterious president of Earth's corporate government and orders the ship's captain (Jeff Garlin) to "stay the course." Wait, we've heard this one before: It was the go-to statement used by the Bush administration for about three years or so when describing its modus operandi in Iraq (the term was abandoned when staying the course started to sound like a bad idea). In Wall-E, the context is quite different -- it's an order to not do something, rather than take action -- but hard to ignore nonetheless.

Certain critics with (surprise!) conservative slants have taken issue with this. At Dirty Harry's Place, John Nolte expresses his disappointment in the first paragraph of his review: "Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome?" he asks. New York Post critic Kyle Smith picked up the rant and decided to write his own, even though he hadn't seen the film yet: "This kind of crack, lame as it is, also breaks the spell of the movie by hurling you out of the theater and back into reality."