"The Wild Robot" Takes Risks, and Makes Major Mistakes
The new movie adaptation heavily relies on WALL-E, too much for its own good
Around 2017, a young-adult book called The Wild Robot took our local homeschoolers by storm.
I know my kids read it. I didn’t.
That’s why I took my 15-year-old daughter to the movie adaptation. She could translate for me. Six times I asked her, “is this in the book?” Since the answer was always “yes” or “sort of,” I assume the movie is a faithful adaptation.
Which makes me question the book’s ideas and value system. “The Wild Robot” takes certain WALL-E premises and amps them up. There, in WALL-E, robots are just metal stewards who help humans re-create the Earth.
But here in “The Wild Robot” they are *mothers* and *conservators*. By some miracle we never learn, the robot in the film learns to adapt to its circumstances, going from annoying chatbot with a bulbous, spidery body, to Earth-Matriarch par excellence.
That’s machine-learning for you!
She, or it, ends up on a Pacific-Northwest island, accidentally activated by otters. That’s after five high-tech robots in their original boxes were lost at sea, washed ashore on this island.
In the style of Robinson Crusoe — an ur-text that modern science-fiction just can never shake — this robot named Rose has to figure out where it is and what it’s up to. Like Eve in WALL-E, she’s all about her “directive,” which here is called a “task.” First she finds her task and then tries to execute it, but since the task is motherhood, it’s an impossible task that requires her to override her programming constantly.
For the animals on the island, the robot is a monster. For us viewers, including tech lovers-yet-cynics like me, the robot might as well be an updated smart fridge or Amazon Alexa. In the beginning, it speaks so annoyingly that it frightens the animals, but for us humans we have heard its patter before.
All of the time, when I encounter that patter in my email inbox, I hit the “block” button.
Rose ends up accidentally killing a bunch of geese, save one, an unhatched gosling. This becomes her task: to raise the young bird to maturity. To do so, she naively enlists a hungry fox, the typical kind of sly predator who will probably trick Rose and eat the gosling.
That first act of the movie is quite dark and chaotic, which frankly is a welcome change from recent animated fare. Before the film, I asked my daughter how many characters in this movie would have giant eyes and giant ears, looking ridiculously cutesy, ala puppies and babies.
We thought it would be ten or more, but arguably “The Wild Robot” has none! Well, the baby goose is pretty cute.
But even Rose herself is off-putting, at least for a long while, until the movie reframes her as she develops into the mother of the gosling and the island-protector extraordinaire. It’s exceptionally strange to watch an animated movie that has no arresting, lovable characters. The two kids sitting behind us, who looked like ages 5 and 6, audibly said they were scared.
Frankly I welcome that, yet when “The Wild Robot” turns towards the topics of motherhood and environmental protection in acts two and three, it occasionally turns itself into movie-syrup. The music swells with huge doses of pathos when we’re supposed to feel something for the robot, the goose, and the fox.
Indeed the movie’s utopian political strains don’t mesh well with its obvious Darwinian assumptions. I have no idea how an entire ecosystem is supposed to “overcome their programming,” meaning their instincts, with its near-literal depictions of the lion laying down with the lamb.
Here, it’s the grizzly bear laying down with badger, and the seagull laying down with the crab.
Seriously, the movie’s arc goes from the chaotic swirl of all animals trying to eat all other animals, to this hippie-picture of a robot basically singing Kumbaya with the same chaotic swirl of animals.
The movie has perhaps its stronger contrast in its depicted separation of high-technological civilization and natural environment, and it preserves that dichotomy throughout, whereas WALL-E tries to heal that split.
This led to lack of believability for me. Do I really want a robot turning into a mother-figure? Consider that if Amazon Alexa had limbs and could move, would I even want it around my babies? Kittens? Even baby birds?
Does the movie think ChatGPT can grow into the capable role of the proper raising of young? Well, yes, I think it does.
To be fair, the movie does have high-tech skepticism, since the humans in it — who are almost completely absent from the movie entirely — have segregated themselves from nature, presumably due to global warming. They’ve got artificial, dense cities, with farms where robots like Rose do all the heavy lifting.
By contrast, Rose learns to overcome her programming — either a movie-miracle, or an analogue for AI development and machine-learning — to raise the goose, to turn the fox from selfish predator to friend to all animals, and to unite the island as a Edenic commune against invasive high-tech overlords.
With heavy WALL-E cues, Rose will put the goose egg in the womb-region of her chassis, and then later she rips out her internal battery, symbolizing what her empathetic heart truly is. That’s so you know, it’s not her electric parts that make her who she is — and just maybe, she has a soul?
I admit I’ve forever been a tech lover, but I’m also a deep skeptic, too. Just witness that yesterday, OpenAI announced it will become a for-profit company, after a long span of crowing about its non-profit goals. Who can fully believe or trust any of these ultra-giant multinational corporations to do good both for us humans and for the environment? At least WALL-E had the good nerve to question such giant organizations, with its hybrid depiction of Buy-n-Large and the US government ruining Planet Earth and creating a techo-dystopia.
Much better recent fare has done the same: “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” “Big Hero 6,” and “The Iron Giant.”
That WALL-E dystopia was full of labor-saving robots, the same that the human cities have in “The Wild Robot.” But this movie goes so far to say that anything can become a great mother, including — gulp! — ChatGPT and your smart fridge. There is actually a line, uttered by an opossum, which says something like, “Nobody has the instincts to be a mother; we’re all just making it up as we go.”
I read that as disturbing beyond belief, though of course I assume that nature has honed and fine-tuned motherhood in all species for the purposes of survival. It’s a little brazen to think humans can equal that in a century or less by creating an artificial entity that can match or even surpass natural motherhood, as depicted via Rose herself.
Had the homeschooling families all agog for the book taken that to heart, they might rethink their love of the story. Should a mother go spend extra leisure time while letting a chatbot like Rose raise her kids? The whole possibility overturns the classic problems in myths and fairytales, where step-parents and surrogate mothers have no maternal instincts for the children they are raising.
Obviously, many adoptive parents are great parents. But this movie seems to claim that maternal instincts are perhaps entirely socially constructed, acquired only through learned trial-and-error in any environment. Even the gosh-darned animals in this film stop salivating over their prey and become, for a moment in time, peaceably communitarian. Again, instincts can be overcome, a matter of mind over matter, or for Rose, robot-soul over programming.
I can take all that as intellectually interesting, with many provocative questions raised here by the film. The movie’s merits are its challenges to the artistic status-quo of Disneyfied fare, including a Monet-like impressionist animation style, which doesn’t quite seem congruent with some of the clear and unambiguous moral messages found by the ending.
Yet “The Wild Robot” makes me appreciate “WALL-E” as a film classic, equally much more charming and much more devastating in its vision of what high-tech could do in the future, in terms of creation and of destruction.
