At Least They Didn't Name Him Ryan

Film: The Wild Robot
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Animated movies, the common wisdom is, are for kids. To be fair, most of them are for kids, at least in terms of the main audience. It takes a great deal of talent from the film makers to create an animated movie that is going to be entertaining for kids and keeps their attention and doesn’t bore adults silly. And, while I think that’s not always a talent that everyone has, it’s definitely a quality that the best of animated films have. This brings us to The Wild Robot, one of the more critically-acclaimed animated movies of last year.

While I am going to talk about the story, I first want to talk about exactly what makes this film work as well as it does in the main: it gets our relationship with “things” right. For a lot of science fiction, the basic thought is that people don’t really care about their tools or the things that they have around them, and this is absolutely ridiculous. Humans will pack bond with anything. It’s why we as the average adult tear up when we contemplate the Mars rover Opportunity, its mission gone on so much longer than planned, sending out the message “My battery is low and it’s getting dark” before signing off forever. That truth—the fact that we will force personality onto our toaster—is what makes The Wild Robot work as a film.

In an unspecified future, a shipping accident drops off a container of robots to wash up on the shore of an island. One of the robots activates, and as per its programming, starts looking for someone to give it tasks to complete. However, the island is inhabited only by animals, all of whom are terrified of the robot. Even after the robot, officially designated ROZZUM 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) learns to communicate with the wildlife on the island, they are terrified of her. An accident causes the robot, who takes the name Roz, to fall into a goose nest, killing the birds and smashing all of the eggs but one.

From that egg hatches a runt gosling eventually named Brightbill (Kit Connor), who imprints on Roz. Raising Brightbill with the help of Fink (Pedro Pascal) a fox who agrees not to eat the baby bird, becomes Roz’s task. Specifically, Roz needs to feed the bird, teach him to swim, and teach him to fly, all before he needs to head south for the winter. Escapades ensue, and some of that will involve the fact that Brightbill is not socialized among the other geese and, as the runt of the nest, was clearly not supposed to survive.

If that were the entirety of the movie, it would probably be enough, but Brightbill flying south happens with a good 30 minutes or more left in the running time. There‘s a lot that goes on afterwards, largely dealing with Roz’s guilt over the destruction of Brightbill’s family early on and her own feeling of obsolescence at no longer having a task. There’s a lot more going on here, and that’s what makes the movie worth seeing—where a lesser film ends, The Wild Robot is just ramping up for some third act action.

The fact that there’s a lot more happening here is also a bit of a problem with the film, though, because there are several parts of the story that are essentially ignored so that we can have more happening at the end. One aspect of the film that seems like it’s going to be significant is Brightbill’s complete lack of socialization, his essential weirdness because of his upbringing by Roz. There are a few moments where he is bullied by some other geese, but when the group gets set to fly south, he’s taken under the wing (pun intended) of a goose named Longneck (Bill Nighy), and that simply...evaporates. To be fair, this is a pretty standard animated movie trope—our hero is often the misfit who doesn’t fit in, but we rarely see that from the point of view of the parent, and this was a chance for that to happen. We have multiple outsiders here—Roz and Brightbill certainly, but also Fink, who is generally disliked on the island.

This is a movie that is hitting those same notes, after all. There's more than a little Lilo & Stitch in this, and a healthy dose of WALL-E and The Iron Giant as well. To be fair, if you're going to make a kids' movie, you could find sources a lot worse to pull from.

The animation, of course, is lovely, which is what we should expect from Dreamworks and their team. And the voice work is good—other voice actors include Catherine O’Hara, Ving Rhames, and Mark Hamill.

This is a hard movie not to like, even if you’ve already seen plenty of movies with this same basic story at the heart. The misfit outcast has his or her place in society; we all belong here in one way or another. It’s a theme that our children’s movies have hammered home over and over again in a world that doesn’t really seem to think that way anymore. The filmmakers have better aspirations for us than we deserve, I think. We don’t really warrant this much trust in who we will turn out to be.

Why to watch The Wild Robot: Animated film has such hope for us.
Why not to watch: There's a lot that could be made from Brightbill’s lack of fitting in, and it’s really just handwaved away.