“Do you need assistance?”
So the Universal Dynamics ROZZUN 7134 asks her prospective operators: crabs. Otters. Moose.
None care for assistance. In fact, none care for ROZZUN 7134 at all.
Oh, the raccoons showed some interest in her wires and lights and parts—so much so that they pried off plenty from Roz’s metallic body. But no one on this unspoiled island—devoid of roads and buildings and people—seems to need her to schedule an appointment, or mow a lawn, or fix a smoothie.
Roz isn’t supposed to be here. The only one in need of assistance here is—well, Roz.
But before the robot can send Universal Dynamics a signal to pick her up, a bear charges. Chases. Sends Roz tumbling down a hillside.
Smash!
A tree lies broken at the edge of a ledge. And underneath, a broken nest. Broken bird. Broken eggs.
And one egg, unbroken. Intact.
Swick!
A fox snags the egg, which seems just rude. “May I confirm that this is yours?” Roz asks.
Receiving no answer from the fox, Roz decides it is not. After a bit of a struggle and an uncomfortable encounter with a porcupine, she gets the egg—while the fox gets a face full of porcupine quills.
Swwwooooshzzzzippphh!
Roz makes quick work of the quills, content to have been of some assistance to something. But then …
Crack!
The egg starts to break … from the inside. And out pops a gosling—a very small, very cute, very clueless gosling.
Well, if it was in Roz’s programming to be pleased as punch, she certainly would be. She has been of assistance to a fox, however unwilling. And now, she has helped introduce a new life into this strange, wild world.
“Was this task completed to your satisfaction?” Roz asks.
Receiving no answer from the gosling, Roz assumes the best and prepares to signal the factory to receive further instructions.
The gosling, satisfied or not, follows. And it soon becomes clear that Roz’s “task” hasn’t been completed. Not by a longshot. The gosling still needs assistance, and will for some time.
Roz is no longer, simply, ROZZUN 7134. She’s now … a mother.
Indeed, The Wild Robot is about motherhood. Most any mother will be touched by the messages in here. But given the differences between Roz and her little gosling, adoptive mothers may be especially moved.
“I don’t have the programming to be a mother,” Roz protests when she learns, from a frazzled opossum, that she has imprinted on the gosling.
“No one does,” the opossum says. “We just have to do the best we can.”
And Roz does the very best she can. Though she has no idea what being a mother is all about, the earnest robot figures it out, day by day, step by step. She finds a way to teach the gosling, named Brightbill, how to swim (awkwardly). Brings in experts to help Brightbill learn how to fly. Protects the gosling from the forest island’s myriad dangers. And even though she makes plenty of mistakes along the way, Roz becomes a mother worthy of admiration.
Naturally, Brightbill doesn’t find his “mother” all that admirable for a time. Like many a human child, Brightbill moves from a gosling who idolizes his guardian to one who realizes that … well, she’s not normal. But while the two deal with times of friction, Roz does more than give Brightbill the physical tools he needs to succeed: Brightbill develops the mental and emotional tools, too. As a one-time runt, Brightbill would’ve been slated by the laws of nature to be quickly eliminated; Roz, and Brightbill’s own resiliency and courage, helped rewrite those laws. And Brightbill not only manages to survive, but to thrive.
But Roz’s care extends beyond Brightbill. She takes that pesky fox, Fink, under her metallic wing, too. And even though most of the forest creatures treat the robot with suspicion or hostility, Roz looks out for them as well.
During one critical season, she risks here “life” for all those critters who would’ve, months before, been just fine if she had rusted away into nothing. In a way, Roz becomes more than just a mother to Brightbill: She becomes a protector for the entire island. And she proves her willingness to give her all for the animals who, in turn, learn to give of themselves, too.
A story that Fink tells Brightbill depicts Roz as an almost spiritual being—perched in the heavens before the gosling called out for her. And once Brightbill called, she came down to care for him.
Beyond that, you see very little here that could be taken as explicitly spiritual. But those who want to dig into these themes a bit can find some powerful echoes of spiritual and even Christian ideals here.
None.
“You need to learn how things work on this island,” Fink tells Roz early in the movie, grabbing a live crab and throwing it into boiling water. “Me, the bear, everybody. We’re all just trying to survive,” he adds, ripping the arms off the now-cooked crab.
Not everything does survive here. Some things end up like the crab. In the movie’s opening moments, for instance, Roz accidentally kills a family of geese: She lifts a lifeless wing and looks at the broken shells, not fully understanding what she’d done.
But death, we know, is a common occurrence here: The island that Roz finds herself on is definitely a critter-eat-critter type of place. In one comic sequence, Roz tries to offer her “assistance” to an animal—which is then snagged by a predator, which is in turn snagged by another predator, and so on. All sorts of creatures threaten Roz at first (including a moose and a rather scary bear). And only some quick thinking—and good aim with a rock—by Roz keeps Brightbill from being gobbled up by an aggressive fish. (Fink himself almost devours Brightbill when he’s still in his egg.) We see worms and clams and other things get eaten, too.
But raccoons are the worst. Roz spends a good several minutes of screen time battling an ever-growing legion of the critters, who seem determined to dismantle her piece by piece. (Even though Roz is, technically, just a fine bit of technology, her sentience makes the scene potentially disturbing.) Eventually, hundreds of raccoons are accidentally jettisoned hundreds of feet into the air—though most seem to land safely in the water.
Roz’s first real friend on the island is an opossum mom. She and her seven kids often pretend to die—either to escape dying for real or, sometimes, just for the fun of it. (The child opossums often tell each other what they’re dying of: one favors sepsis, another spontaneous combustion.) When one little opossum seems to get eaten, Mommy Opossum reacts with something between relief and an “Eh, it happens” shrug of the shoulders. (The kid returns and says, “It’s OK, Mom! I’m alive!” to which the mom says, sarcastically, “Oh, yay.”)
It’s clear that Fink did not have a great family life himself. When he suggests that Brightbill can learn how to swim the same way his mom taught him, he demonstrates by punting Brightbill into a lake.
Life-threatening dangers are never far from The Wild Robot’s narrative. Both a harsh winter and a raging fire threaten to kill much of the forest’s wildlife. A flock of geese get attacked by robots, and at least one doesn’t survive. A falcon sits in a nest strewn with bones. Roz leaks fluid now and then, reminding viewers that her time on the island is taking a toll on her. As mentioned, Fink suffers a bad run-in with a porcupine.
We sometimes see glimpses of cities partly underwater, suggesting that an environmental catastrophe related to climate change has seriously, and negatively, impacted humanity.
[Spoiler Warning] Eventually other robots from Universal Dynamics come to the island to take Roz away: An ensuing battle leads to several explosions, and the robots themselves can be quite frightening. And Roz is ultimately subjected to almost a sort of torture that might be a bit traumatizing for young viewers.
One arguable misuse of God’s name, and we do hear one use of the crudity “sucked.” And one character exasperatedly exclaims, “Male bovine excrement!”
None.
A possum child vomits. Fink suggests that he’s a great storyteller because he’s a great liar, and storytelling is “lying-adjacent.”
When Fink tells his story—one meant to reassure to Brightbill how much Roz loves him—a listening Roz doesn’t quite get the concept at first. And when Fink talks about what Roz feels when she looks at Brightbill, for instance, she feels—
“Crushing obligation,” Roz says.
“Very lucky to be a mother,” Fink amends.
“And I will not leave until I have completed this task, which has delayed me, damaged me and violated my protocols, potentially voiding my warranty!” Roz concludes.
And Roz hasn’t even gotten to the best part yet: the worries, the fears, the regrets. The Wild Robot touches on all these parental emotions and more. And the story comes back to the same conclusion that mothers around the world have reached as well: Nothing is more painful. Nothing is harder. Nothing is more beautiful. And I’d never, ever trade it for anything.
The Wild Robot is perhaps more for parents than kids. The messages of parenthood and family here are so strong, so potent, so raw. That said, kids will still find plenty to like about the film, too. It’s funny and sweet and sad and—despite its futuristic, AI-and-talking-animal conceit—real.
Director Chris Sanders (whom we talked with on our podcast) has tackled the subject of family plenty in his previous movies: the difficult father-son relationship we find in How to Train Your Dragon; the surprisingly poignant father-daughter relationship in The Croods. But The Wild Robot may be Sanders’ best film yet. The art is lush and gorgeous and, at times, breathtaking. But the narrative wraps all of its artistic and technical excellence around a warm, beating core.
Fink may say that storytelling is “lying adjacent,” but here’s the funny thing about stories: They sometimes hit closer to truth than straight facts do. In this story of a well-meaning robot and her struggling gosling son, we find hints of what it means to be a parent. To be a child. To be kind. And to be loved in all its messy reality.
Certainly, parents should be mindful of the story’s violence. We do see scenes here that could potentially bother young and/or impressionable viewers. The island Roz and Brightbill inhabit isn’t a safe island—not by a longshot.
But it is a good island. And The Wild Robot is a good story—one that may have you smiling as you blink away a tear or two.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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