OK, I may not be the first person here to think of this.
I'm generally not.
But, tonight my son was watching "Monsters Inc." from PIXAR Films during dinner and, for the first time in watching it, I began to think that there was an activist under-tone to it.
Note, any "quotes" here from the movie are probably inaccurate from the movie. Going on memory.
What suddenly caught my attention was when Mike Wazowski tried to talk Sully into taking his car to work, and Sully said "Mike, we're going to walk, there's a scream shortage". (The movie plot, for the un-initiated, is that the screams of children are the source of the power in Monstropolis).
It suddenly hit me, they use the same source of power in their cars as they use to light the city; the screams of children, their equivelant to electricity. Electric cars? I'm probably over-blowing this, but I'm having fun with it.
Now, the story's theme is that the monsters create energy for their city through eliciting the screams of children. They enter the children's rooms through a portal into their closet doors at night, scare them and collect the energy. Children are becoming less and less afraid of them as time goes by though, so their power source is declining.
Yes, I'm probably reading way too much into this, but perhaps it's like Dr. Seuss with many underlying messages (Horton hears a Who, Sneetches on the Beaches, etc.)
Now to Mr. Waternoose, the evil, greedy owner of the company. What's an unethical energy company owner to do when his source of energy and corporate profits are threatened? Why, use any dirty, illegal trick in the book to save his sorry ass, of course.
In this case, Mr. Waternoose decides to try to kidnap children from their bedrooms and use a scream extractor to pull the energy from them, leaving them as nearly hollow shells. (No children were harmed in the production of this film.)
And, since the citizens of Monstropolis consider children to be toxic, "a single touch from a human child can be deadly" says Mr. Waternoose at one point, the plan also introduces a potentially grave health risk to the city. Of course, in the movie, the threat is simply untrue (unlike real-life, where energy companies will accept ANY actual harm to the environment to further their money-making) but it was perceived and ignored.
Exactly what you would expect from a money-grubbing, cares only about profit, energy executive.
By the end of the movie, however, it is discovered by Mike and Sully that children's LAUGHTER is a much more potent source of energy than their screams of fear (alternative energy).
Unlike in real-life, however, in the end the money-grubbing energy exec is arrested and Mike and Sully take over the company to exploit the new, more friendly energy source to save the company and the city.
If only real-life was more like the movies.