Animation used for treating adults as children
The twisted moral compass of The Wild Robot results from this era’s tech domination. It’s a cartoon fantasy about a culture that loses touch with its humanity. This animated adventure, written and directed by Chris Sanders, of the How to Train Your Dragon cartoon series, is part daydream, part nightmare that cozies up to our dependence on machines — from cellphones to AI.
Sanders extracts all human characters from his tale when an unmanned Universal Dynamics cargo spacecraft crashes on a remote island, damaging its shipment of ROZZOM robots. A single intact android (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) emerges, blinking its gears and cameras at the new environment. Confronting a menagerie of feral animals, it adjusts its language program so that these nonhuman creatures form a cooperative, making their way through the wilderness — a parable.
Only the robot manufacturer’s brand name, ROZZOM 7134, provides any trace of humanity. Its mechanical legs resemble a Star Wars stormtrooper while its humanoid design, featuring extended coil arms and over-resilient survival adaptability, is both awesome and a little frightening — mankind’s extinction made cute.
None of this is necessarily for children. The Wild Robot, based on a fantasy book series by Peter Brown, addresses adults who have lost their moral bearing and does so by treating the audience like kids. (Pablo Berger’s trenchant Robot Dreams is superior for respecting adult experience.)
Despite good intentions, Sanders commits to the gimmickry typical in most contemporary cartoons. There’s so much false narrativity in modern animation that copycat filmmakers no longer know how to be creative. Sanders combines Pixar’s dystopic Wall-E with DreamWorks sentimentality, yet the admittedly lovely scenery often evokes Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (1999), a standard-setting animation achievement that never got the popularity it deserved, perhaps because — being pre-Y2K — Bird’s beautiful nostalgic vision of Cold War space-race technology seemed outdated.
Sanders replaces nostalgia with cynicism. The crisis that Nyong’o’s Roz goes through feels post-apocalyptic. It is both derisive and misanthropic in the near-camp manner of the inane, failed fantasy Wicked.
Wicked also works from a broken moral compass, rousing a New York Times reviewer to tell MSNBC, “It’s about living under fascism; that’s all it is.” The Wild Robot shares that demoralization. Its harsh animal-world metaphor (“They fought and ran and hid, but mostly they were scared”) leads unexpectedly to an anxious preoccupation with fraught parenthood: Roz adopts Brightbill (Kit Connor), an orphaned gosling that, in a steal from Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling, must learn to fly among its own kind and migrate for the coming winter.
Using nature without spiritual belief (which Wicked perverts and so gets defended for its obvious, offensive politics) weakens The Wild Robot as a morality tale. A sly fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), replaces the Jiminy Cricket–style conscience in Pinocchio, as does a family of vicious, death-loving Opossums obsessed with hive-mind snark. In this context, Roz’s sudden maternal reflexes are unfathomable. She describes her reluctant feelings by noting that “the Alpha-113 processor represents the fusion of all human knowledge with the most powerful reasoning device ever developed by humankind.” Then she simply summarizes, “I have a kid.”
But Roz’s motherhood is a phony device — like the racism in Wicked — that dismisses human tradition and customs. Sanders may pay tribute to the palette of Miyazaki and to classic Disney animation, but his nihilist reflex gives way to commercial sentimentality, reducing morality to manipulation. The Wild Robot’s underlying theme — humanity vanquished — is depressing. This contradicts the classic anthropomorphic analogies of Disney’s Pinocchio and Dumbo, as well as The Little Prince, The Iron Giant, Babe and Babe: Pig in the City, and Zack Snyder’s astonishing Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole.
In Millennial animation, mythology has been displaced by psychotherapy (such as Roz’s “gender-affirming” bewilderment). Given this political trend, Sanders has made a terrific-looking but sterile movie. It tells rather than shows, a defect of the politically chic approach to pop culture. His pretty colors (from the magenta aftermath of a robot-factory explosion to winter-gray forests, verdant woods, and underwater blue) merely set up superficiality. Roz moralizes, “In order to survive, we must be more than we were programmed to be.” Yet she sounds most programmed when she says, “I was listening with a different part of myself. I am a wild robot.”
Like the condescending Wicked, all this is essentially false — a life lesson taught without moral bearings or Christian ideology. Roz rescues wildlife in a Noah’s Ark analogue, then goes from being a disingenuous Christ figure offering sacrifice and promise (but no resurrection) to a mawkish maternal figure. As its three Oscar nominations attest, The Wild Robot subtracts spiritual fundamentalism in service of Pixarism.