May 29, 2025
The Wild Robot (2024) Review
by Polly Peneva
“The Wild Robot” is a beautiful film that explores themes of resilience, the immigrant experience, motherhood, friendship, community, and how this challenges our conditioning for the better. Chris Sanders implores the audience to question Artificial Intelligence and suggests it is a detriment to life itself.
“Programming” Theme
“Programming”, as it’s referred to in the film, is a powerful representation of the human ability and necessity to “override” environmental and familial influences that shape our psyche into certain behaviors. Roz is designed by her creators to complete tasks, and since she is a robot, she was not taught empathy or connection. Alone and abandoned, with zero knowledge of her environment or ability to communicate with its inhabitants, she quickly learns the languages to survive and fulfill her purpose- to serve. She adapts at a rapid pace, learning to communicate with her surroundings, a powerful representation of the immigrant experience. Purposeless and stuck in a survival state, she flees a bear attack. Due to her ruthless factory settings, she accidentally crushes a goose nest with only one surviving egg. Though she has no programming for feeling, she feels an inexplicable need to protect the egg when she identifies an embryo inside, beginning her accidental journey into motherhood.
Motherhood & Community
Naturally, Roz is regarded as a monster by the animals as she tears through their environment. Roz struggles to assimilate, but through the task of raising the gosling (eat, swim, fly), she slowly begins to learn compassion. Since virtual assistants and robots complete every task assigned to them, Roz is given this task by a mother possum she encounters, also assured by her that “no one does [have the programming to be a mother]. We just make it up”, an endearing reminder to parents in the audience. The possum and Fink, the fox who initially hunted the beloved egg, are Roz’s teachers. As she does her best to prepare the baby gosling for flight (which she learns is a runt), he too gets bullied, and her motherly instinct to protect kicks in when he tries to acclimate with his peers. In the process of this, she ultimately embarrasses and alienates BrightBill (the now teenage gosling), from his kind, the geese preparing for migration. As mothers strive to protect their children from danger, it often results in resentment from the child, and BrightBill is no exception, abandoning Roz in a teenage-like rage. The mothers guilt is represented by BrightBill’s discovery of her “accident”, a move she made purely for survival, but has lasting implications on her child nonetheless.
Weaponizing Weaknesses
With the help of Fink, even though BrightBill is angry at her, she employs a new helper to teach him. The falcon represents weaponizing weaknesses, teaching BrightBill that what makes him different is what makes him special. These new skills, taught to him by a member of a different species, ultimately make him the strongest member of the migration team. Against all odds, BrightBill completes and ends up leading his flight mission, all due to the relentless push of a mother’s unconditional love and the help of his community. Like most mothers, Roz’s plight is greatly overlooked and unnoticed and all the sacrifices she’s made are unappreciated until the very end of the story. She doesn’t care. Roz doesn’t seek to be recognized. She seeks to make sure her son completes his mission and is safe. Though Roz misses him, she knows that he must be independent and be with his community- a literal representation of the bird leaving the nest.
Fink, like Roz, is ostracized, disliked even- he has been operating out of survival, and as a result he lives a lonely life, hence why he finds such solidarity with Roz. They are both outcasts, and do not need to stick together- Fink, by nature, actually should be BrightBill’s enemy, but love retrains Fink’s “programming”. Roz and Fink acknowledge that even though nobody on the island likes them, it is still their duty to try and save everyone.
“…that’s the funny thing about life”
Often times, people make unfavorable or unsavory choices in the name of survival. Life is cruel and unforgiving, as we see most clearly in the animal kingdom. That does not mean anyone is not deserving of love and friendship, and community is how we pull our strengths out of one another. It is everyone’s first time experiencing life and everyone, particularly mothers, makes mistakes. All they want is to protect their children and prepare them for life- all while reminiscing on a time their children were dependent on them. Immigrant mothers, particularly single ones, are often mocked and alienated for their differences in culture. As the film shows, it truly takes a village.
Wild Robot = Animated Support = Virtual Assistant
There are also heavy themes of Technology vs. Nature, but the morals of this film are very human. The themes of “Programming” vs. “Instinct” flawlessly capture the essence of what it is to be a human. A beautiful allegory with many tear-jerking moments, this movie truly deserves its 3 Oscar nominations- Gints Zilabalodis’ Flow, another allegory, ended up winning, using Blender’s 3D rendering to achieve realism, while The Wild Robot uses non-photorealistic editing. It’s clear audiences are leaning towards themes about how nature survives in a post-apocalyptic world, and how putting all our trust into artificial intelligence might fail us. What Roz overrode in her program is what AI lacks- humanity and heart (and remember- artificial intelligence is the absolute contrary of virtual assistance due to lack of human context).
May we all appreciate our mothers and the members of our society who shaped us into who we are. Life is about grit, and love is the binding force that makes it worth fighting for. In a world that is drifting further away from humanity and seeking technological intervention, connection is the real solution.
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