The Pirates! In an adventure with bigotry

SPOILER ALERT: Major plot point giveaway ahead!

I've just had the dubious pleasure of sitting through the movie 'The Pirates! In an adventure with scientists' at the cinema. OK, it was quite funny in parts (in particular, lots of clever anachronisms about evolution), but to be frank, I thought it was a bit laboured. Still, hubby seemed to like it.

But to the point. The story is set in Victorian England, with good ol' Queen Victoria playing the role of number one baddie. She is manipulative, power-mad, and has a penchant for eating rare and endangered animals for fun. And she has her sights set on Polly, the Pirate Captain's beloved dodo. An ex-parrot!

Now you'd think that would give the script writers plenty to get their teeth into, but what do they do when they want to make fun of the queen? They have their protagonist tell her that dodo is fattening, and given her already portly figure, she should probably abstain because otherwise it would go straight onto her "chubby thighs". I kid you not. In other words, it's not bad enough that she's an evil megalomaniac. More importantly, she's fat!

Now you might think that I'm making a lot of fuss over nothing here. As hubby pointed out to me, Queen Vicky was also incredibly fit and had ninja fighting skills, she did not "wobble around". His point being that the portrayal of the queen as a larger lady was not entirely negative - in a physical sense. But this really just strengthens my point. With so much else going on, the appropriate way to diminish her prowess and attack her character was deemed to be to call her a fatty.

It's worth noting that the Pirate Captain himself was practically bursting out of his buttons, but nobody commented on his figure. And when it is suggested that Polly the parrot/dodo might be a little on the round side, the Captain defends her by saying she is just big boned. But of course, they're the good guys. On the other hand, let's not have a go at the Queen for being a nasty, dodo-eating, villainous sociopath. We can cover the whole lot just by calling her fat.

This movie was rated U, making it suitable for ages 4 and above. I've written before about how children as young as six already have such negative images of fat people that no-one wants to be friends with the chubby kid. Is this really the lesson that light entertainment should be teaching our kids?