What’s mainstream now? Notes on Wall-E and Curious George
The latest two kids’ films we’ve seen at our house are Wall-E and Curious George. Wide-distribution children’s films generally can’t have a message that’s too edgy (as I mentioned in my post about morals for children in “Cars” and “Happy Feet”), so they can give us an idea of what sorts of ideas are squarely in the mainstream.
In that light, Wall-E’s premise — that future humans had rendered the surface of the Earth unfit for human habitation — kind of surprised me. Maybe I’ve been reading too many conservative blogs, but I thought there were still enough climate-change deniers to out there to make this sort of thing a touchy subject. Perhaps not. But, since I already discussed the interesting social commentary in Wall-E on my personal blog, for the moment I’d like to talk about the recent film version of Curious George
I’ll admit the first thing that jumped out at me was when the main human character excitedly mentioned giving a lecture on “lungfish — the closest living relative of the tetrapods.” I guess I’d mistakenly assumed that the “Intelligent Design” movement had succeeded in making evolution seem controversial in the minds of the general public. On the other hand, the filmmakers might have figured that science-minded parents would like that line whereas creationists would have no idea what he said, so everybody’s happy.
I hate to even begin to analyze this film because it is a deliberate pastiche of ridiculous movie clichés where the punchline is always “Of course this is absurd and could never happen!” Nonetheless, I’ll say the film seems essentially science-friendly, with a hero who’s a nerdy science guy. Still, it’s weirdly jarring that a guy who will casually mention australopithicus or apatosaurus seems to think that Curious George — obviously an ape — is a monkey.
It’s also kind of interesting the way the story was modernized. The original story had kind of a colonialist aspect that might not go over so well today. In this film they made it clear that explorers who went to unfamiliar lands hired locals — not just for labor as cooks and porters — but also needed their expertise:
Strangely, just because Ted found “The Lost Shrine of Zagawa” he was allowed to take it back to New York with him, no questions asked. But, of course, if you complain about that, you’ll also have to notice that he also couldn’t have flown around with a bunch of balloons, and that lady wouldn’t have left eight open cans of paint open in her apartment, and Ted and George couldn’t just get in a rocket and casually do a couple of orbits around the Earth, etc., etc., etc…. 
