Belonging, Parental Love, & More in The Wild Robot
“She thought kindness was a survival skill, and, do you know what? She was right.”
I didn’t expect to find such a painful and tender story of neighborly love in The Wild Robot, DreamWorks Animation’s newest project about a shiny metal helper robot from some wealthy utopian world that finds herself in the middle of an island filled with dangerous wildlife and harsh lessons from nature. The film from experienced director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch; How to Train Your Dragon) might be the most intelligent and graceful display of neighborly kindness, and potentially parental love, to come to the box office this year.
Lupita Nyong'o voices ROZZUM unit 7134, whom we come to know as “Roz,” and she speaks robotically of the “tasks” she has been programmed to bring to a completion. Her whole existence drives home that mechanical urge for productivity that so many of us feel daily. And she begins to lose her purpose as she struggles to find a customer on this island full of beavers, bears, foxes, and geese. Her ignorance of the dangers of the wilderness nearly gets her killed (if that’s even the right language to use to talk about a robot). It’s not until she finds Brightbill (Kit Connor), the runt and lone survivor of a Canadian goose nest, that she finds a new task and, with that task, a new purpose.
The Wild Robot brandishes a beautiful animation style that reminds us of the etymology of the word we use to refer to this specific kind of filmmaking: to animate is to breathe life. And Sanders’ film celebrates the breathing of life from start to finish through the robot Roz as her life experiences and new responsibilities make her into something assuredly more human-ish. Her main anxiety is even the brevity of that breath of life as she watches her “child” transition into adulthood in the blink of an eye. Simultaneously, its visual presentation also breathes life into the now stale animation styles that dominate most big-budget kids’ movies. Everything has an impressionistic painterly quality to it. The colors of the island fly off the page and you can almost feel the texture of the animals. The island booms with life, chaotically so, and the animation reflects that.
Roz’s slick metal futurism makes her stand out in the green and brown shrubs of the forest. She doesn’t belong and the visual disparity with her new furry neighbors pounds her strangeness home. “The Monster,” everyone calls her. Bear and chipmunk alike do not welcome her to their forests where familiarity seems to rule the day. She slowly earns a few friends. Fink the Fox (Pedro Pascal), also a communal pariah, is the first to give her a chance. It’s her niceness, as Fink alludes to in the quote I began with, that changes their hearts and minds — as well as her slowness to judge. Her kindness quite literally saves their society. Together, Fink and Roz raise the undersized gosling into a grown bird ready for the formidable, and almost suicidal, migration — though, the other birds belittle Brightbill for his atypical bird qualities. An opossum mom (Catherine O'Hara) befriends her too, then a quirky beaver (Matt Berry), and eventually Longneck (Bill Nighy), the leader of the geese. Eventually, the once outsider becomes the muscle of communal unity, empowering the forest to unite to face the deadly winter together and, eventually, to fight off an invasion of AI-powered robots.
One of the best scenes in the films takes place during a bitter winter. The unforgiving snow threatens all life on the island and only Roz, as a robot, can come to their aid. The once chaotic images of disparate animal types and sub-communities displayed in the film until this point calms into a tableau vivant. “Tableau vivant” is a French term for “living picture” used to refer to photographic compositions similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and they are the most appropriate words to describe the scene. Roz and Fink first broker peace between species, a seasonal truce if it were where the bear must agree not to eat the deer and so on, and this truce lays the foundation for a more robust community. The animals stuff themselves into Roz’s cabin in a scene not unlike popular artistic depictions of Noah’s Ark and the calm serenity of the tableau vivant points the way for the island’s newly emerging community.
As her journey with the critters continues, Roz’s metal shell picks up forest trappings and twigs from her new world much like picking up a tan when one moves to a warmer climate; the filmmakers mirror her acceptance into the forest community by predators and prey alike with her appearance change. Her evolution in appearance becomes uplifting. The change is borrowed from the Western film genre with the white man who “goes native”; but in animation and with a more innocent robot substitute, the decision disarms the trope of its racism and recenters it around a deep-felt sense of belonging. Through kindness, Roz becomes one of the “people” of the forest. And that’s a lesson worth teaching to adults just as much as children.
As much as I adored the neighborly love, The Wild Robot will be known for its consoling motherly love. The “task” Roz gets assigned is to raise Brightbill from a gosling into a goose. She shields him from the vitriol of his kin in a way that only motherly love can, even if he’s a bit awkward thanks to his upbringing. He speaks as if his vocabulary were borrowed from an instruction manual and he doesn’t quite fit the “if it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, then it’s a duck” mold. He sees the world in a way that’s informed by his robot mother — and when he rebels against that world, he does so out of a longing for a greater sense of belonging. The little goose learns he doesn’t need to look like or talk like everyone else to belong and that lesson brings him right back to Roz’s metallic arms.
