The Wild Robot (2024)

PG because it does get a bit frightening at times.  While not necessarily being a story about mortality, there is a fair share of death in this movie.  None of it is gratuitous, but you might --as a parent --be having a conversation about characters dying.  Children's movies also like frightening scenarios that make younger children nervous.  But the movie is also incredibly emotional, which might make your kids cry.  My six-year-old, who tends to be emotionless, actively wept for the finale of this movie.

DIRECTOR:  Chris Sanders

What?!  I know.  It's not spooky season themed.  But do you know what?  Family movie nights don't count.  Also, it was one of those movies that has gotten so much good press, that we absolutely had to watch it.  I don't know what the marketing strategy is for this movie, though.  It's absolutely crushing at the box office and then they made it available for home ownership?  I don't mind.  We did a chilly garage movie and it was everything I wanted from garage family movie night.

What is it about robots feeling emotions that hits the nail on the head?  Seriously.  Star Trek: The Next Generation, Wall-E, The Iron Giant?  Now this?  Something about the potentiality of feeling is something that is so glorious to us.  I have a theory.  After all, this blog forces me to have theories about what is going on inside the human consciousness that makes us react the way we do.  The Wild Robot completely understands what it is that makes us cry.  As pointed out in the MPA section above, my six-year-old, who traditionally does not care about anything, was openly weeping for the end of this movie in the best way.  I can't weep at movies and here is this kid, completely getting the emotional resonance of the end of the film.  She was right.  I wished that I could cry like she was crying at the end of the movie.  Again, I have to stress that I'm positively dead inside.  But if I had to be clinical about it, it almost makes no sense that we bond over cybernetic, unfeeling characters more than we do ones that over-emote.  

Part of that comes from the appreciation of emotion.  With robots, there's the understanding that the robot doesn't need to do what it is doing.  Robots aren't part of the social contract.  A recurring motif in The Wild Robot is the notion of programming, especially in terms of completing goals.  These robots all tend to get emotions accidentally.  They view humanity from the perspective of the outsider.  In the case of The Wild Robot, humanity is parsed off to personified animals, but you get where I'm going with this.  Human like traits are initially seen as absurd and counter to logical ways of functioning.  After all, Brightbill is meant to be discarded as the runt of the litter.  The notion that Brightbill has value should be completely lost on this robot, who is simply completing a job.  But it is the overriding of programming that is somehow an emotional choice for us.  So, we could look at the value of the robot who has emotions in different ways.

The first value might be the idea that we, as people, are programmed to do things.  After all, most protagonists serve as avatars for the audience. Our entire lives, we are programmed with the things that make us who we are.  It's why we might mirror our family's politics growing up.  But it is when we discover our actual beliefs, often in situations of great diversity, that we have that emotional resonance with others.  Maybe the robot isn't such a bad idea in that case.  We open our eyes to the greater things in life.  With the case of Roz and Brightbill, it is the awareness that comes with being a parent.  Double so, if you consider this from the perspective of an adoptive parent.  If you do, which I hope is actually the case, it is tied to the notion that people weren't necessarily born parents.  It's the idea that the process of parenting is a bit of give-and-take until one becomes something else as the child develops.  That's a glorious thought.

But the movie can also be from the perspective that all feeling is important feeling.  Roz very rarely has happy moments in the story.  Maybe as a means of locking that evidence in place, most of the happy moments actually occur before Roz is able to process these feelings.  The playfulness that comes with Roz, Fink, and Brightbill are all in those early Eve moments from Wall-E, where she is unable to see the greater value of the simple.  Roz sees herself as a robot for the Rozzum Corporation, first and foremost.  Play is simply a means to achieving a goal.  But when Roz actively chooses a course of action beyond what is considered foreign to programming, every single one of those moments is sacrificial.  There may be joy to Roz teaching Brightbill how to fly. But that moment is bittersweet, given the fact that the skill taught will only lead to Brightbill leaving sooner. Roz, due to her outsider and practical status, is almost hyperaware that everything that she is doing will lead to her own sense of loss.  

You can see why my six-year-old cried.

From a film perspective, the structure of The Wild Robot is a bit confusing to me.  If you have not picked up on this, I do think that the movie is fantastic. My son, who has read the book, says that this movie is his favorite.  I genuinely believe that to be true.  Mind you, I'm going to have to do another check in once we get another Spider-Verse movie.  But he's right.  This movie does absolutely deserve all the accolades it is getting. The only thing is the structure that I started talking about.  I'm really used to children's tropes at this point.  We have The Little Engine that Could element of the story.  We have The Mitten element of the story.  We have the false utopia of Toy Story 3.  All of these have done with one of these elements and had the entire movie built around that concept.  Getting Brightbill to fly seems like the foundational piece of the film.  But that's also a hard sell for a concept.  I have The Little Engine that Could as my example, but we could also look to Vanelope learning to drive in Wreck-It Ralph as our example as well.  The entire film of Wreck-It Ralph is, at its core, trying to get Vanelope to be a racer.  It has B-and-C storylines.  That's not what is going on with The Wild Robot.

To a certain extent --and I apologize for painting with a wide brush --the movie is a series of mini-stories.  Getting Brightbill to fly is the first story and it will have consequences later in the film.  But the movie keeps giving the movie more stories. And, somehow, each story works. After Brightbill leaves, the story becomes about loneliness and purposelessness.  It --and if I was being a real jerk, I could talk about how absurd it is having the predators and prey live together --becomes something about finding value in fundamentally different communities.  It's beautiful and painful as Roz struggles to survive as everyone else thrives.   That story ends and then the movie becomes about found family versus being attached to one's roots.  And the kicker!  The movie ties all the disparate plots back together.  This seems a lot less impressive than it is.  But the odd part really lies in how the movie makes clear delineations between the separate stories.  Usually, all of those elements are muddied together and The Wild Robot was just cool with making them separate stories.  I love it.

I have been vocal about how cool animation looks today.  I saw an X post complaining about how new animation looks like trash compared to the old Snow White era Disney stuff.  I hate the comparison.  These are different things. Do I tend to like Pixar stuff more than DreamWorks?  For the most part, yes.  But DreamWorks hasn't been phoning it in lately.  Sure, there's going to be a moment when I have to admit that all of this cool stuff is starting to look a bit similar.  That's the course I imagine that we're going to get post Into the Spider-Verse.  But, my goodness!, does The Wild Robot look pretty.  It feels so frenetic and lived in.  I don't know why robot battle damage goes a long way to making a movie look glorious, but it does?  I can't explain it.

I'm going to be a bit open about something that could be considered a bit of a weakness when it comes to The Wild Robot.   I don't consider this to be a weakness, but I can be kind of objective at the same time.  The movie has the same problem that Steven Moffat's time on Doctor Who did.  Now, I consider the Moffat era to be the quintessential era of Who out there because of this choice.  But I'm also aware that I don't have a leg to stand on (much like Roz!) when it comes to this argument.  I love when Doctor Who wins because of love.  I do.  I think it's top tier storytelling when the goodness of someone is what overcomes the threat of the story.  Moffat's Doctor did that a lot.  People believed in love, thus the bad guy who left packing.  It's touching.  The Wild Robot has scores of these moments.  Fundamentally, none of this movie should work out the way a logical movie would demand.  It's all that emotional value, which some might find annoying.

​Not me.  I like that stuff.