The Wild Robot
Written and Directed by Chris Sanders
Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy
Rated PG
Runtime: 102 minutes
In Theaters September 27

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

It’s a rare film trailer that makes me cry, but when it comes to The Wild Robot, I would tear up every time I saw the preview in the theater, no matter how many times it played. And apparently, I’m not alone. When the first footage and trailer for the film debuted at the Annecy International Film Festival, “the auditorium was full of gasps and sniffles; many were audibly sobbing.” This response partially has to do with the subject material—The Wild Robot is adapted from the 2016 award-winning middle grade book by Peter Brown—but it also has to do with the stunning animation. Chris Sanders is a seasoned animator and director, writing and directing classic films like Lilo and Stitch (2002) and How To Train Your Dragon (2010), but The Wild Robot pushes his penchant for illustrative and impressionist animation to new, truly beautiful levels. Combined with Kris Bower’s emotive and stirring score (the first he’s done for an animated film), the fluid, gorgeous animation plucks at something yearning and, well, wild in the audiences’ hearts.

In a distant future of Earth, a Universal Dynamics cargo vessel carrying the latest batch of ROZZUM robots crashes on an uninhabited island, leaving only one intact: Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o). She wanders around the island, trying to fulfill her primary programming directive to find a customer to give her a task. After a bunch of hilarious misunderstandings with the local wildlife, she accidentally destroys a goose’s nest, acquiring the lone surviving egg, which hatches and imprints on her. Along with a fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), and other woodland creatures, Unit 7134, now re-named Roz, must raise Bright Bill (Kit Connor), teaching him how to feed, swim, and fly before the autumn migration.

While not as esoteric as many sci-fi films on the subject of artificial intelligence, The Wild Robot is no less philosophical. Roz’s entire programming is focused on her accomplishing a task, any task really. Nyong’o’s voicework here is especially good: Roz begins the film with a chipper, salesperson voice, but, over the course of the film, her voice softens and deepens, allowing for more nuance and warmth. She realizes that not only will the task she has been given/assigned herself challenge the limits of her programming but also that there can be more than one meaning or purpose to her existence.

I noted back in June after seeing Inside Out 2 that there seems to be a genre of animated films marketed for children that are actually for adults about their childhood ordeals and trauma (stop making me talk about your movies in therapy, Pixar). In some ways, The Wild Robot also exists in that space: Roz’s slow realization of her identity as one of multiplicity—mother, robot, friend, leader, a person in a community—is an adult realization and probably will speak the most poignantly to the mothers in the audience. But there is plenty here for children too, both in the hilarious hijinks of the animal characters and the compelling story of Bright Bill’s difference from the other geese as he has to adapt to new ways of survival. It’s a difficult line for many children’s films to walk—entertaining both children and adults—but The Wild Robot walks it well, most likely due to the fact that its middle grade source material allows it to be more nuanced than your average children’s film.

The film doesn’t shy away from the darker sides of its subject either: despite how cute the animals are, this is still the natural world, in all its brutal glory (Sanders has also credited Bambi (1942) as an influence). While nothing depicted on screen is particularly upsetting, animals do get eaten (mostly sea creatures), and Fink takes great pleasure in explaining to Roz the predator-prey cycle of the food chain. Again, nothing in this film is likely to distress a child or animal violence sensitive adults like me, but this frank portrayal of the workings of the natural world emphasizes the contrast between the world Roz comes from and the wildness of the island. The few glimpses we get of the human cities emphasize orderliness and comfort. They are shiny and white, and the robots seem to have taken over all menial labor. 

It reminded me of the way certain tech companies are creating AI to theoretically take over the most difficult parts of human experience—not manual but emotional labor. One of the most recent examples of this is in the creation of chatbots to “end grief.” Pain and grief and other difficult emotions are not easy to feel, and humans have tried to avoid feeling them for millennia through various methods chemical and spiritual. But outsourcing these experiences to AI misses the point of being alive: those unruly and challenging emotions serve a purpose. Without them, humans become less; we become insular, unempathetic, and never truly grow. Roz is only able to become when she synthesizes her programming of non-violence and service with what she learns from the challenges and the diversity of the wilderness.

Perhaps we can find new inspiration in The Wild Robot to become more than we are, children and adults alike. The film is escapism, but it’s emotionally honest escapism, calling to us to embrace our wild animal instincts. Bring your feelings (and your tissues) to see The Wild Robot.