a review of 机器人总动员

I had to watch this for a Visual Culture course I was taking in undergrad. I was recently reminded of it when a friend said she had watched it and had really enjoyed it. She had somehow missed the glaring problem with it. This movie sweeps you up in the storyline between the cute robots and turns fat people into a punchline. The fatphobia in it is absolutely, wildly dehumanizing. In this class I was taking, it felt like everybody loved the movie and I was sitting there feeling completely alienated. I didn't have the words to talk about it at the time but I do now, so I just want to say, this kind of plotline about how funny or sobering or whatever it is that future tech will make people fat, is awful. The fat characters are literally designed to be ridiculed, becoming fat is portrayed as a threat to humanity, many of the visual gags punch down at the expense of fat characters, and it just goes on and on. Such huge elements of this movie are entirely based on fatphobia that if they removed this issue, there would be very little movie left. It depresses me that not a lot has changed in the last 15 years with regard to humanizing representation of fat folks. It's 2024, we are still hurting for good fat representation in media, and people still think this is a good movie to rewatch.