"The Wild Robot": review

Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal) and Roz the service robot (Lupita Nyong'o)

"The Wild Robot" is a 2024 DreamWorks animated production directed by Chris Sanders and starring Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, and Catherine O'Hara. The basic premise is that a shipment of caretaker/service robots, part of a future human civilization, crashes in a storm on a remote island populated by forest animals. Inadvertently killing a goose's family, the service robot named Roz dedicates herself to the mission of training the one surviving gosling, a runt she names Brightbill (Kit Connor), to fly so that he can migrate south with his fellow geese when the time comes to leave the island. Themes of parenting, self-transcendence, and self-sacrifice permeate the film, which offers beautiful vistas of a lush and forested island, occasionally set in contrast with or in opposition to the strangely sinister hi-tech human civilization that Roz comes from. Meanwhile, no humans make an actual appearance in the movie. Brightbill, living with Roz and Fink, learns the confidence to fly and has to deal with the consequences of Roz's inadvertent destruction of his family.

American movies are often about patchwork families formed of unrelated people who create bonds of love, and who function as a unit. I'm enough of a modern American to go along with the idea that this is a perfectly normal concept of family; I do wonder how the rest of the world views this notion, though. The idea of a patchwork family—something I just saw in watching "The Expanse" as the diverse, disparate crew of the Rocinante becomes a cohesive unit—is consistent with a longstanding American notion that blood ties don't matter as much as the ties of love and commitment (think: the moment in "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" when Yondu, a flawed parental figure, tells Peter that Ego might be his father, but the planet-god was never his daddy)—that merit and worth come less from heritage than from choice and action (see also Kevin Costner's speech about the roots of nobility in the 1991 movie "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," when Robin tells Marion about knights who panic in battle while a lowly squire pulls a spear from his own body to protect a dying horse).

At the same time that the movie is preaching the above American value, though, it's also preaching the arguably more universally accepted (and possibly contradictory) value of belonging to one's own flock. Brightbill's mission is to be able to fly away in migration with the rest of the geese (who are, at first, derisive thanks to his runt/weakling status), i.e., with his own kind. It is, when you think about it, an interesting and layered clash of values that never gets explicitly mentioned in the movie. The movie itself, viewed through the lens of this conflict of values, is an obvious allegory for humans, who can possess both values and for whom those values sit in tension. Being an allegory about humans, the movie has no real need to show us any human characters.

The thinking viewer, though, may have to suspend a great deal of disbelief for the plot to make much sense. If Brightbill is ultimately meant to be with his own kind, how realistic is it for a goose to live with a fox (who initially wants to eat him) and a robot? How realistic is it for forest animals to cooperate and coordinate with each other?  How can a robot develop both sentience and a mothering instinct, as well as adapting to a life in the wild (hence the movie's title)? There's a lot about this story that, in order to make its moral points, is positively unnatural when you think too much about it. But if you can get past those questions—the sort of questions that might plague the mind of a lover of hard science fiction—the story is a good and heartwarming one, yet also one with no easy answers.

Overall, I liked "The Wild Robot." It's not my favorite animated film (I don't think anything will ever dethrone "The Incredibles"), but it's a solid one, not to mention a great one for kids who might not fully appreciate what their parents go through in raising them—the self-doubt, the fear about the future, the constant concern for the welfare of someone in their care, the feelings of pride and loss that come with maturity and independence—all of the ingredients of that thing we call love. Recommended.