The Wild Robot

dir: Chris Sanders

2024

Okay, so, yes – this is a far more conventional “animated” movie of what people think of when you say that something is animated – lots of movement, lots of colour, lots of dialogue filling up the empty spaces, far more so than the last animated movie that I watched, being Robot Dreams. There should be room in this world for both, but let’s be honest; for every quiet, dialogue-free painstakingly animated story that talks about the sorrows and aches of loneliness and love lost, there are three million animated flicks with pets and their secret lives or yellow idiots or ogres or dragons being trained or toys who’ve lost their way but have a story to tell.

Also there’s those Pixar ones about people’s feelings ugh.

So, whilst this is conventional, as in, a story so simple and straightforward you feel like you’ve watched it before you’ve even watched it, it manages to be very enjoyable.

Very enjoyable. As in, it deliberately crowbars the emotions out of you that a subtler flick would gently try to coax.

Lifting from almost every animated movie ever made, The Wild Robot sort of manages to be its own thing, at least for long enough at certain moments, that you can forget all of that. Comparison is the thief of joy, or so they say, so talking about a movie where the main character is a robot that transcends the limitations of its programming and learns to love seems like you could be describing almost every movie where the music swells and people / creatures / androids hug.

But that’s okay. I grinned / cried like an idiot at several points, knowing full well that I was being manipulated, and that’s… acceptable. They fooled me yet I am thanking them for it.

Rozz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a robot that’s washed up on the shores of an island somewhere. There are a bunch of animals on the island, but none of them speak English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Sorry, that was from Pulp Fiction, about the only flick this doesn’t lift from.

Rozz has their programming. They are programmed to do whatever a customer wants or requires. But there are no customers on the island that can communicate a need or a want. There’s just a bunch of animals, who regard the robot as a monster.

This monster, struggling for meaning and purpose, goes “native” and learns the local lingo through a process I call “magic”, since animals don’t speak languages, and they don’t all speak English, but which the flick calls “deep learning” or something similarly made up. They can now speak to all the creatures in a manner even Doctor Doolittle would envy, but they’re still not getting anywhere closer to meaningful work.

Please state the nature of the medical emergency. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?

Rozz rages against their inadequacy within a place where Nature predominates, not understanding that their programming does not allow them to interact with these creatures in a meaningful (capitalist) context, as it’s not transactional, it’s just kill or be killed.

When a bear tries to show Rozz how unhappy he is with the level of customer service, Rozz inadvertently crushes a goose nest, killing everything except an egg she becomes focussed on as having to save.

Why? Because this robot needs a customer. And the baby goose that eventually ensues gives Rozz a purpose – protect its life from all the predators (and the risks of its own stupidity) and other island dangers, teach it to swim and most importantly teach it to fly so it can migrate when it comes time.

Ah, a collective sigh of relief. Rozz finally has someone to look after.

There’s a version of this story that occurs in the non-animated, non-robot world, that we have seen countless times, which is heavily gendered, and kinda fundamentally sexist and emblematic of the patriarchy. It ultimately repeats, and repeats again “Women, you ain’t shit if yer not looking after a young ‘un so us men don’t have to. Nothing you can possibly do will ever be as important as that.”

You may ask yourself, or point out to me that Rozz is a robot, and thus genderless and not a biological lifeform that such a statement would apply to, so why would I refer to this trope. To that I say, then why is Rozz voiced as female, and referred to by all the other characters, as “she”? I was playing the pronoun game deliberately earlier because, yes, it doesn’t make sense why robots would be gendered, within or outside of stories.

And yet it always happens. Did Wall-E from Wall-E have to be gendered as male, and Eve as female? No, but they left us in no doubt as to whether it still reinforced notions of heteronormativity, even though they are creations independent of gender or sex.

And yet these codings carry expectations, biases, elements always accepted as being ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’, which are nothing of the sort.

Of course in watching Rozz do everything she can to protect little Brightbill, her diminutive charge, or protecting all the denizens of the island, regardless of how shitty they’ve been to her, of course I sobbed and thrilled as the occasion required. I just… it sticks out to me about the expectations, the biased patriarchal bullshit it brings with it. Thus it becomes just another story where something even vaguely female is expected, demanded to sacrifice “herself” for the good of a baby.

They don’t do this with male-coded protagonists. Male-coded protagonists kill to protect their charges, found family or otherwise. They sacrifice blood, sweat and tears and body parts to defend, to attack, to revenge / avenge. But the nuts and bolts of child-rearing over months and years? Nah, that’s too boring. Get back to shooting / punching people already.

But Rozz can do all that and more. She can protect, educate, and cut people’s faces off if she really wants. Nothing I’ve written / mansplained thus far should detract from Lupita Nyong’o’s vocal performance. It’s perfect, hilarious in parts, plaintive and heartbreakingly touching in others, and inspiring at other times. I think everything this luminous actor has ever done has been stupendous, to the point where I think if she stubbed her toe in the middle of the night or threw a television out of a hotel window she would always find a way to make it sound intense and compelling.

Even if it’s all so familiar, it was still thrilling to watch. The animation of Rozz as a being is perfect for this character, and watching “her” steadily degrade / become One with Nature works beautifully in synch with this story about a technological being somehow becoming more organic. The different styles of digital animation used enhance the story visually in other ways, such as the almost Impressionistic rendering of the animals or elements of nature, not least of which is the feisty fox Fink ably voiced by Pedro Pascal.

Yes, there are training montages, clichéd and generic dialogue at times rendered meaningless when you wonder to yourself as to why even a translated proto-language shared by animals on an island would grasp so many ungraspable concepts which even humans would struggle with.

Also, there’s an assortment of cheese and a bit of schmalz that would bring a tear to the hacky eye of Steven Spielberg himself. The flick flirts with talking a good game regarding death, the inevitability of facing death, and how the natural world is based on immutable cycles of life and death, but this is still a Dreamworks animated movie – they hardly go full gothic or anything. A scene where a possum explains how they are always surrounded by death which enhances their appreciation of life, when one of her seven offspring gets eaten by something, they still have to walk it back and have the critter screech “I’m okay, I didn’t die”, as if a single death would pop the protective bubble around all the kids watching.

They’re not the real audience for this. I didn’t watch this in a cinema, but I guarantee you for nothing that plenty of kids watched certain scenes with interest, and a little bit of confusion as their parents blubbered next to them. The theme of parental sacrifice and doing absolutely everything for your kids, adopted or otherwise, is one that chokes up parents, not the children wowed by the action scenes or the flight sequences.

And, oh, I struggle to imagine the heart, adult or child, unmoved by the migration scene. You would have to be a sociopath or an executive at a health insurance company to be unmoved by that scene towards the end.

It’s highly enjoyable. Its themes are somewhat simplistic (go on, transcend your programming already, I dare you), and in one major case fairly regressive, and I also didn’t feel like I really understood what kind of world this was, like, post-apocalyptic because of Capitalism as in Wall-E, or pre-apocalyptic, but set in the future like... Interstellar or I, Robot?

Who knows, doesn’t matter. Wild Robot succeeds where many others fail, and I dare say it would even stand up to multiple viewings, because it gets the core element right, being that Nature may be ruthless and red in tooth and claw, but that doesn’t mean we all have to be, because kindness is a survival strategy as well.

8 times let us sacrifice ourselves for you, indifferent and embarrassed children, go on, out of 10

--
“Storytelling is lying adjacent and I lie for a living.” – I really felt that, for some reason - The Wild Robot