A big message in a little robot?

The GREAT thing about broadly ambitious movies that strike a chord with mainstream audiences is that they often inspire equally ambitious critical theories about their message and themes -- or, in some cases, about how the critical establishment has totally missed the boat about what's going on. One of my favorite bloggers, Bill Wyman at Hitsville, has now weighed in with a wonderfully provocative post, posing the question: What if Pixar released a ferocious charge attacking the American way of life and reviewers didn't notice? Here's a snippet:

"If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don't you think there'd be some sort of notice taken? But Pixar does it and the reviewers barely mention it. . . . I'm no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in our field of vision."

I think Wyman is being a little too dismissive of the critical response, since even he has to acknowledge that some critics, notably the New York Times' A.O. Scott, managed to see the point quite clearly -- and I'd argue that our Kenneth Turan made note of it as well -- but Wyman's larger argument is worth considering. Sometimes the most pointed cinematic social criticism goes unnoticed because it is disguised by the genre elements of a film or, in this case, perhaps because we view Pixar films (and animated films in general) as being triumphs of visual style and storytelling, not social commentary.

Want to see a classic example of the critics initially ignoring a film's underlying message? Go back and watch Don Siegel's 1956 classic B-movie thriller, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Made at the tail end of the Red Scare, it was initially viewed by critics as a cheap but effective horror film about a small town where residents are being secretly replaced by duplicate "people" hatched from alien pods. I saw it on TV one night as a kid and had to sleep with four lights on in my room for about a month afterward.

In recent years, the film has inspired heated critical debate. Everyone agrees it was a sly political allegory, but no one agrees on just what. Liberals see the pod invasion as an allusion to McCarthy-era paranoia and conformity; conservatives see the pods as a symbol for communism, where everyone would be forced to think alike.

I think Wyman will be proved right (that there's more going on in "Wall-E" than meets the eye) and proved wrong too. If "Wall-E" keeps drawing crowds at the multiplex this summer, I'm betting that coverage of the film will migrate to the op-ed pages as critics, and a host of other commentators, head back for a second viewing. The good news: Unlike most summer movies, "Wall-E" is laced with a quietly disturbing message that offers plenty to ponder.

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This item and others can be found on the Big Picture blog (latimes.com/thebigpicture).