Discuss: Do Politics Belong in Kids Movies?
June 30, 2008
Filed under: Animation, New Releases, RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy, Scripts, Newsstand, Politics
A couple of people have been griping about Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s refusal to admit that his cute little motion picture 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.
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