Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Wild Robot’ on VOD, a Lovely and Thoughtful Rumination on Life, Death and Parenting

The Wild Robot (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is a hit, deservingly so, and a sure-fire way-too-early Oscar contender for best animated film. Based on the novel by Peter Brown, the Dreamworks Animation film is from director Chris Sanders, who brings major cartoon pedigree (his director credits include Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods) to the story of a lost-in-the-woods robot who ends up adopting a baby goose as her own – a story that’s ripe to delight young audiences while their parents choke back a tear or two. 

THE WILD ROBOT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: ROZZUM 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), or Roz if you’re into the whole brevity thing, is in one heck of an existential conundrum: She’s programmed to help people, but has no one to help. There are no people on this wooded island, see, just animals. Foxes, badgers, geese, deer, otters, turtles and one ornery bear, but no humans, and if any species needs more help than any other, it’s humans. She tries to help the animals but just ends up startling them – chalk it up to a communication breakdown, at least until she uses her gee-whiz computer brain to translate the woodland-creature gibber into recognizable English (which of course is rather helpful to us, the movie-watching public). 

What with one thing (the bear) and another (she runs away from the vicious bear and ends up accidentally destroying a nest), Roz ends up in possession of a lost and lonely goose egg. This could be a metaphor for coming up with zilch, but Roz ends up getting everything: The egg hatches a runt goose who peers up at the robot and imprints on her. Congrats, Roz, you’re a mother! Her first order of business is naming the goose Brightbill (Kit Connor), and shooing away Fink (Pedro Pascal), a sneaky little fox who might appreciate roast goose for dinner, but who also might need a pal since he lives a solitary life. In fact, Fink ends up helping Roz figure out how to live and survive in these woods, and be a single mother to a goose who’s smaller than all the other geese. 

While we’re on that topic, let it be known that this movie does not shy away from the implication that, without Roz protecting him, Brightbill likely wouldn’t be fit for survival. This is an environment where animals eat other animals in order to survive, and are rather glib about it – on an average day, you and I might be hey how was school today, but these animals are like hey did anybody you know get eaten today? I mean, there’s a mama possum (Catherine O’Hara) in this movie that has a slew of little rodent kids, and when one doesn’t turn up she just goes oh well at least I still have all the other ones. Life! It’s harsh! It will go on without you!

And doesn’t Roz know it, especially now that she has a legit objective, namely, getting Brightbill up to speed on the arts of swimming and flying. Without the latter skill, he won’t be able to join the other geese when they migrate, leaving her with, of all things, an empty nest. That’s not even a metaphor. Mind you, all of this kinda goes against Roz’s primary programming, but she finds a way to hop the fences and work outside the boundaries, which is indeed a metaphor. There’s also the case of the transmitter she’s supposed to switch on so reps from the corp that manufactured her can retrieve their lost goods, but why would she do that now that she’s developed an emotional attachment to a baby goose. Somehow. How’d that happen, exactly? I don’t think we have a good answer for that.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Key references are WALL-E and The Iron Giant, but Roz has some Baymaxisms via Big Hero 6, the animals made me remember Over the Hedge existed and the flocks o’ flying birds are things we saw in the talking-duck movie Migration. 

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: When’s the last time you heard a celeb voiceover role and didn’t know who it was because they were so good at using their voice to create a character? Well, that’s what Nyong’o does here.

Memorable Dialogue: Fink’s words of encouragement for Brightbill are truly inspiring: “Fly like you. Not like them.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Thematically, The Wild Robot is surprisingly dense. The setting is a gorgeously animated woodland forest where, as I mentioned before, evolution takes its ruthless course. The film is refreshingly honest about the omnipresence of death in nature, to the point where it mines some dark comedy from it. In that context, we see a robot whose profound naivete toward survival-of-the-fittest dictums means she shows compassion for the animal who needs it most – the undersized goose who, without Roz, would likely be someone else’s snack. The takeaway: People facing physical challenges deserve to live and appreciate life too, and helping them do so is profound in its intimacy.

That sounds heavy, but Sanders deftly layers these assertions in the subtext, beneath some of the funny-animal shtick and action sequences that are storytelling tropes of family-oriented animation. Good old Teaching Moments abound, if you so choose to explore them. Where the story comes alive for older audiences is in Roz’s parental angst, which finds her in search of a purpose once Brightbill finds his wings and jets south for the winter. She’d dedicated her entire life to making a real goose out of him, and once he’s gone, she quite literally gathers moss. 

Most movies would conclude once Roz achieved her goal, but The Wild Robot instead chooses to explore further, turning over ideas about the power of community in pursuit of a greater good, and finding space for an action-packed conclusion where the corporate overlords send far less friendly bots to take Roz back to where she “belongs.” So we get a who-am-I-and-what-is-my-purpose arc couched in a classical natural world-vs.-modern tech conflict where diversity and spirit face off against cold, mechanical power. The latter doesn’t function as well as other themes here, but man, this movie is sneakily ambitious, chock-full of high-minded musings on life and death and conscious existence, with a playful and seductive sheen of comedy and lovely, standout imagery. This movie doesn’t just take flight – it soars. 

Our Call: The Wild Robot is thoughtful, moving and almost endlessly appealing. STREAM IT and then STREAM IT again.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.