From The Telegraph in the UK:WALL-E has garnered rave reviews for its satire on consumer culture, in which future humans are depicted as a group of obese gluttons who never leave their padded floating arm chairs.
But one group is not amused - the swelling ranks of fat pride groups, who believe the film propagates anti-obesity hysteria comparable with the quest for the perfect body by the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany.
As the WALL-E controversy hit the headlines, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (Naafa) was last week holding its annual convention in Los Angeles, a celebration of so-called "flabulous figures," seminars on fat discrimination, a fat fashion show, podgy pool parties and entertainment from weighty singing group The Fatimas.
Fighters for fat rights are calling for legislation to ban weight discrimination in the workplace, denouncing airlines that demand they buy two seats and car manufacturers whose seat belts are too small.
They are also battling doctors who won't treat patients who refuse to lose weight and companies that won't insure them.
They seek to reclaim the word "fat", dismissing terms like "overweight" and "obese" as morally loaded.
Research published in April by Yale University's Rudd Centre for Food Policy and Obesity suggests they might have a point. It found that one in eight people now complain of weight discrimination, up from one in 14 a decade ago. The report compared the impact on victims compares with racism and sexism.
The anti-WALL-E crusade began on the Internet. Rachel Richardson of the Coalition of Fat Rights Activists (Cofra), used her blog, "The F-Word", to object that the film "singles out and targets obese people as the primary cause of mankind's demise."
The backlash has become a cause celebre for a growth industry in the United States, where pro-flab "fat-tivists" are campaigning for human rights for the full of figure.
The main task of groups like Naafa, Cofra and Largesse is to lobby for new laws to ban weight discrimination in the workplace. Miss Wann helped win that battle in San Francisco. But just four cities and one state in the US - Michigan - have explicit protection for fat people. Britain has no such laws.
Sanda Solovay, a fat discrimination lawyer, said: "Everywhere else where people have a weight discrimination claim they have to rely on disability law. It's case by case and it depends on the individual judge."
Interestingly, I couldn't find much American media coverage on this issue, except a few blogs. The interconnection between fat discrimination and disability discrimination has been explored brilliantly in several books and articles by communications scholar Katie LeBesco at Marymount Manhattan College in NY City.
