The politics of 'Wall-E'

Wall-E is a cute little robot, said the blog GOPMOM. But he’s also a cog in the propaganda machine of “West Coast elightened liberals” who feel obligated to preach to the rest of us—“even when we’re paying for it.” Pixar’s new movie was supposed to be just a sweet love story between two robots—instead it’s a ham-fisted environmentalist attack on consumerism.

The conservative backlash against Wall-E is annoying, said Rod Dreher in BeliefNet’s Crunchy Con blog, because the message of this lonely, trash-collecting robot trying to make a polluted Earth inhabitable is “ultimately conservative.” The film urges us “to put technology in its proper place—which we can only do when our own souls and communities are rightly ordered.”

Some grown-ups might be too blinded by politics to get it, said Frank Rich in The New York Times, but the kids in the audience understand that this movie “was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.” It would be nice if “the fierce urgency of now that drives ‘Wall-E’ and its yearning for change” would rub off on the presidential candidates.

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