This article is part of IGN’s Fantastic Fest coverage and is a spoiler-free look at Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot, featuring the voices of Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal.
I had some concerns going into The Wild Robot. While I quite love a kid’s movie with heart, I’ve been trepidatious around anything surrounding robots and AI lately. With everything going on with regulation of AI or, rather, the complete lack thereof, as well as our inability to compete with the technology’s carbon footprint, I’ve lost any patience for even the tool’s most practical applications. That, combined with the issue of Big Tech sticking its nose in the arts far too much over the past 5-10 years, had me worried about The Wild Robot. Sure, the film being written and directed by Chris Sanders (the man who brought us Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon) should have eased those concerns right out the gate, but the last two years of creatives fighting tooth and nail to protect the film and television industry has left me cynical.
Mea culpa, Chris. My cynicism was unfounded.
The Wild Robot does make you fall in love with Roz (Lupita Nyong'o) who is, yes, an AI-powered robot helper created by an evil tech giant. After a storm sends her shipment off course, Roz is stranded on an island inhabited only by animals. She learns to speak their language by studying them for some time, and basically does nothing but cause severe damage to her surroundings for much of the first act of the film. Roz eventually finds herself forced to care for a baby gosling, and the story sort of snowballs from there.
By the third act, it becomes apparent that Sanders and the team behind the movie were very aware of the tightrope that they needed to walk to make something heartfelt without accidently celebrating a technology that has created an existential threat to their preferred medium and continues to exacerbate the severe climate risk we are facing around the globe. Roz may be an AI-powered tech, but she eventually learns that she is a “dysfunctional” one. Her emotions — which she discovers partway through the film — are not a feature, they’re a bug, and they separate her entirely from the rest of the robot fleet that she was created with.
The filmmakers take that thoughtfulness seriously not just with Roz, but with the world around her. By the time we see the rest of the planet outside of the island the robot’s been stranded on, it becomes apparent that climate change took a major toll across the globe. The consequences of that are not explicitly tied to AI — which is logical since this is a children’s film and that is a lot of big information to unpack — but it does make the choice to depict a climate disaster as a clear part of the future world Roz and the animals inhabit. It even offers some glimmers of hope so far as life after said disaster is concerned — but digging too deep there will take us into spoiler territory.
All of this no doubt makes it sound like The Wild Robot is a hyper-serious film that tackles big themes, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The film, like all of the best kids movies, has complicated concepts woven into its D.N.A. to help introduce munchkins to its ideas, but otherwise it’s just a fun, emotional (and quite pretty) journey that encourages us all to ignore our programming and choose kindness.
The Wild Robot hits Theaters September 27. I cried like a baby. Bring tissues.
