If You Don’t Love The Wild Robot, Check Your Pulse
Brimming with thoughtful themes and stunning artwork, The Wild Robot is a deeply meaningful new touchstone in animated film.
good.film
5 months ago
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Go with us here. Close your eyes and picture a glorious, burnt orange explosion as millions of crisp autumn leaves billow through the sky. Now, a flock of wild geese wheeling in lockstep on their annual majestic flight. Finally – and really hold your breath for this one – you’ll hear the delicate crack of a paper-thin eggshell, nestled on a bed of vivid-green moss.
We could be describing the latest Attenborough series (or the view George and Amal Clooney wake up to from their Lake Como chalet, probs). Instead, it’s all rendered in stunning detail in DreamWorks Animation’s latest release, The Wild Robot. Surprised to learn that all this beauty lies at the heart of a ‘robot meets goose’ movie? That makes two of us.
Of course, animation has “heroed” nature before – see The Lion King, WALL-E and basically the entire output of Studio Ghibli. But there’s two core elements to The Wild Robot that set this film apart from the rest. The first is its gorgeous, painterly style. Taking inspo from Peter Brown’s 2016 book of the same name, The Wild Robot’s arresting texture – you can literally see the brushstrokes on every rock and tree trunk – has been hailed by critics & audiences alike as “visually stunning”, “mesmerizingly animated” and “nothing short of spectacular”.
The second? The film’s deeply human themes, encompassing everything from the meaning of motherhood and the lasting legacy of adoption, to our worship of technological advancement and our fraught relationship with the natural world. Like we said – The Wild Robot is nothing short of surprising.
What is The Wild Robot about?
In an unnamed (and seemingly, untouched) wilderness, ROZZUM Unit 7134 comes online – and emerges from a shattered crate to find herself stranded amongst nature. If she was meant to be a city delivery, well, this one can definitely be marked ‘lost in transit’... cheers Amazon. She’s a domestic helper for the modern age: the kind of futuristic au pair a family would nickname “Roz” and set to work on the weekend’s folding & ironing. But there’s no family here…
Studiously searching for her first task, “Roz” (brilliantly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) quickly takes stock of her environment, studying a crab to work out how to scale an ocean cliff, and activating her ‘learning mode’ to help gradually decode the chattering animals around her. Clever touch, DreamWorks: it means we can hear the animals speak throughout the movie, just not in an old-school Disney way.
Roz is capable, intelligent, and advanced, but she wasn’t built for this environment, and the native animals swiftly reject her. All except one – a baby goose that imprints Roz as his mother figure, after an accident with his nest. In one stroke, Roz is forced to navigate the complexities of survival in the wild AND foster parenting, while she waits for rescue by her own parent… parent corporation, that is. Though it sounds simple, The Wild Robot boasts a nuanced emotional message that’s leaving millions around the world with ‘something in their eye’...
How does The Wild Robot examine technology vs nature?
The bedrock of The Wild Robot is the ever-present tension between our natural world, and the stuff we keep tearing from it and adding pretty, blinking lights to (aka: technology). While our push notifications and air-conditioning make it easy to forget, The Wild Robot reminds us that we actually do all live on a spinning rock where most life forms are trying to eat the other, or avoid being eaten themselves. Unlike a sentient robot, nature isn’t smooth and polished and helpful. Nature is threatening.
There’s no better example of that than the thrilling sequence where Roz barely escapes after being chased by an enraged brown bear (gotta admit, there’s some vicarious zing in seeing nature fighting back against technology for a change). It’s a savvy flip of the current social conversation, which seems to be fixated on how threatened WE should feel by technology. There’s a repeating motif throughout the film that echoes this: animals are terrified by Roz, expecting to be immediately killed by this non-natural entity. Fear drives their primal nature, because it helps them survive. As one character points out, “Kindness is NOT a survival instinct.”
“Roz has her programming, and she quickly learns that the animals on the island have their programming, and theirs is an uncompromising thing. But all the characters [show] that, even if we feel trapped in our lane, we have the ability to learn, grow and change.”
~ Director Chris Sanders, The Hollywood Reporter
In one scene, Roz uses her strength (hey, she is a machine) to dig a burrow for all the animals to huddle in during an intense winter blizzard. Her underground Noah’s Ark saves their lives, but the group is a dangerous mix of predators and prey. Their usual fight for survival, out in the wild, has a different shape now – so can they overcome their natural instincts? It takes Fink, a scrappy fox with an allegiance to Roz (voiced by Pedro Pascal) to urge the tense community to agree on a truce until spring: "We must become more than we were programmed to be." In other words, if we can’t push ourselves to be better, our differences will tear our society apart.
The film’s climax is quite literally a tech vs. nature showdown, when Roz’s parent corp and their army of, ahem, much less friendly reconnaissance robots track her down. It sets up a choice for Roz: stay or go? Return home, to familiarity but not family? Or create a new “home” in this strange new world that doesn’t fit her design? There’s a triumphant moment here that anyone who’s ever felt like a misfit will fist-pump (and hey, isn’t that all of us?): when the recon robot shrieks “You do not belong here, this is a wilderness!” and Roz replies, with what we humans would call ‘passion’: “And I am a wild robot!”
How does The Wild Robot explore adoption & motherhood?
Remember how Roz is programmed to take on tasks? She lands a doozy after encountering Brightbill the gosling (Kit Connor). Freshly hatched, he’s the last surviving hatchling of his whole family. For Roz, the fact that Brightbill’s stuck to her like glue pretty much does not compute. "I do not have the programming to be a mother," Roz explains to Pinktail, a forest opossum who happens to be laden with a good half-dozen wailing babies of her own. Parents will get a laugh out of Pinktail’s response: “No one does, we just make it up.”
A more poignant line gets drawn when Brightbill (who’s endlessly mocked by the other geese for being raised by a ‘monster’) probes Roz for more about her background. Who made her? Where does she come from? Existential alert! When Roz admits “I don't know my origin point,” her isolation is a bonding moment – Brightbill and Roz are both completely cut off from the ‘family’ that created them.
“Peter revealed the thing he had on his mind when he was writing ‘The Wild Robot’ was the idea that kindness could be a survival skill. I immediately wrote that down and thought, ‘Okay, this needs to be memorialized on screen.’”
~ Director Chris Sanders, motionpictures.org
Cleverly, The Wild Robot encapsulates the parenting process with laser-focus by adding a ticking clock to Roz’s challenge. As a migratory bird, Brightbill’s life literally depends on him becoming independent: if he doesn’t learn how to fly and migrate with the rest of the flock, he’ll freeze to death over winter. There may be no better summary of motherhood than when Roz exclaims – with a notably stronger sense of ‘emotion’ than she possessed when she first powered up – “I don't know what I'm doing, and I have to, because he's relying on me!”
We won’t spoil the outcome of Brightbill’s climactic journey, but we have to give props to the filmmakers; it would’ve been so tempting to humanise Roz with some version of a teary, mum-and-son reunion. Thankfully, sanity prevailed – guys, SHE’S A ROBOT – and they resist the schmaltz. Having said that, there’s still room for a touching acknowledgement from Roz that, in the course of raising a life form, she’s changed. Pointing from her head to her chest, she states with a robotic equivalent of wonder: “Lately, I've been processing less from here… and more from here.”
What kind of messages does The Wild Robot have for kids?
As the “runt” of the nest, it’s easy to feel your heart tugged by Brightbill’s underdog energy, no matter how old you are. But the little gosling with the stubby wings is clearly the emotional proxy for kids in the theatre, for whom the ‘learning to fly’ metaphor can easily apply to their own challenges in life. In one aerial sequence where Brightbill is coached by Longneck, a kindly senior figure in the flock (voiced by Bill Nighy), he’s told "Your shape makes it harder to fly, but easier to turn and dive." The message for kids? We all have our different strengths – even if they're perceived as weaknesses.
It’s also heavily implied that Brightbill would probably be killed in the wild without some lucky interventions from Roz and some other allies (there’s that harsh Mother Nature again). But writer/director Chris Sanders ensures that the emphasis is placed on internal strength being a more noble trait than its physical counterpart. “Brightbill was never supposed to get this far,” Longneck advises Roz as Brightbill takes to the skies. “But his heart is much bigger on the inside than the outside.”
“The reason this film is resonating with people is largely because it’s a handmade film. This film is more handmade than any CG film that has come along in decades. So the human element in this film is far, far more prominent than other films around it.”
~ Director Chris Sanders, IMAX.com
In essence, the thrust of The Wild Robot is that empathy leads to understanding. Roz, at first, represents modernity and conformity – but over the course of the film, she learns from the animals to loosen her programming and truly care for others, not just ‘complete tasks’. Similarly, the animals learn from Roz (whom some of them initially call a ‘monster’) to soften their prejudice and reshape their own fears. For a younger audience, the message is clear: kindness CAN be a survival skill, after all.
There’s some positive reframing, too, like when Brightbill is deeply upset to learn the truth about what happened to the siblings he never knew. He feels betrayed that Roz kept the full story from him ("I really thought you were my family!"), until Fink the fox points out that the traumatic event actually has two sides: the accident that killed Brightbill’s family, also saved him. Seeing Brightbill pause, then calmly admit "I never thought of it that way" is a nice example of emotional self-regulation – and a bonding moment with the closest person he has to a father figure.
What are critics saying about The Wild Robot?
“There’s never been an animated movie that reflects the world in quite this way.”
- Peter Debruge, Variety
“With its humanist vision, The Wild Robot emerges as a stunning achievement.”
- Matthew Jackson, AV Club
“The Oscar for Best Animated Feature is The Wild Robot’s to lose.”
- Emily Zemler, Observer
So what’s the takeaway from The Wild Robot?
If it’s not already obvious, The Wild Robot is surprisingly nuanced. Rather than barrel in with a single, heavy-handed MESSAGE, it’s one of those films that will speak to everyone in a different way. Some will tune straight into its themes of corporate greed, seeing a cautionary tale about our ongoing environmental arrogance – like, for example, the moment we witness whales gently cruising beneath the ocean surface, ABOVE San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge. Clearly, in this story, humanity’s been busy with robotics while the ice caps melted away.
Others (maybe the more politically minded among us?) will see a tale designed to remind us that even in a tech-driven age, our commonalities outweigh our differences… a notion that’s basically been blown to pieces by our dopamine-hitting, algorithmically-driven screens.
And then there’s another group: though it probably goes without saying, this is a film that will mean a great deal to adoptive families of all stripes. It shines a glowing spotlight on the fact that meaningful actions and values like empathy, sacrifice – and yes, kindness – are worth far more than sharing the same name or DNA (or even the same microprocessor).
Roz was programmed for acts of service, and she found the ultimate one: motherhood. Did that journey somehow help reprogram her sense of duty into something more like real human kindness? We can’t help but be reminded of the line James Cameron wrote for Sarah Connor at the end of Terminator 2: “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”
The thing is, we all have programming. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be upgraded a little at our core. While we might continue to relentlessly chase progress, The Wild Robot seems to be posing us a challenge: can we also find a way to slow down and be a bit nicer to each other? We’ll leave the final word to Fink the fox, who summed up his friend, ROZZUM Unit 7134, this way: “She thought kindness was a survival skill. And you know what? She was right.”
Want a great deal to catch The Wild Robot in cinemas?
GRAB YOUR DOUBLE PASS DEAL HERE!
