We liked Wall·E, and the kids liked Wall·E, and I’m a little surprised at all the on-line blowback. I don’t mind the cynical anti-environmental posturing from TV blowhards who haven’t even seen the film, but I didn’t expect the weepy “Et tu, Pixar?!” protestations from beleaguered fatties, now propped up by this Slate piece from Daniel Engber.

Very slowly now, plus-sizers; it’s not hard. Wall·E says nothing about the percentage of American obesity currently caused by genetics vs. other causes. Wall·E is completely silent on whether or not high fructose corn syrup will somehow lead to environmental disaster. Wall·E doesn’t care whether or not fat people will cause health-care costs to skyrocket. Most of all, Wall·E isn’t about the kids who called you “Jabba” in ninth grade.

Wall·E makes just one statement about weight, and I wouldn’t have thought it’d be a controversial one. The movie suggests that, if thousands of people lived a completely sedentary lifestyle cocooned in giant Eero Saarinen chairs and drinking liquid cupcakes for every meal, for 700 years, that they might put on a little weight. That’s it. To further placate the powerful Fat Lobby, there’s even a little script nod to the damage that space “microgravity” is doing to the humans’ bones. Don’t worry, guys. The weight gain of the future is a bone density issue. It has nothing to do with the Hostess Fruit Pie you have in each hand right now.

Contra Engber, Wall·E never links the fatties in space to the ravaged Earth either. Note that Fred Willard and co. are perfectly svelte as they rape the environment. It’s the later space exodus, once the Earth is already unlivable, that has Earth’s entire population punching new holes in their space-belts. And, although the movie is mostly about the robots, it also goes out of its way to make the roly-poly humans heroic and proactive, once they’ve broken out of their consumerist shackles.

And that’s what you’d expect, right? Isn’t Pixar staffed largely by cartoonists and computer engineers? If there are two fatter demographics in America than cartoonists and programmers, I’m not aware of them. I’m sure that plenty of different body types worked on the movie and helped shape its viewpoint. They’re not the nasty popular kids laughing at you again, you with your jumbo popcorn in the third row.

Ob:trivia, since this is theoretically a trivia blog, not a cheap-fat-jokes blog. Wall·E and some of the other robots in the movie are voiced by longtime movie sound innovator Ben Burtt. Burtt has won his share of technical movie awards, dating back to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. What this means that Wall·E is, I believe, only the second theatrical movie ever made whose leading actor has four Oscars! (It would be the first and only, except for a crappy movie called Grace Quigley that Katharine Hepburn made in ‘84.) And it’s not likely to happen again anytime soon, unless Nicholson wins a fourth Oscar pretty quick. (The only other three-Oscar actors, Walter Brennan and Ingrid Bergman, are, uh, not working so much anymore.)

Thanks to the 60-year-old Burtt, Wall·E is also one of three big action movies this summer where the lead character is played by an actor born in 1950 or earlier. What are the other two?

Edited to add: Answers quickly provided here. And I forgot Clint! Eastwood will join the four-Oscar-leading man club this winter.