In theaters now, DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot is charming, gorgeously animated and frequently heart-tugging — but, if you want to teach your kids about nature, you’d be better off with episodes of The Wild Kratts.
Or, if you want to give them reality-based nightmares about their favorite critters, try this guy.
What Is The Wild Robot About?
Adapted by writer/director Chris Sanders from Peter Brown’s beloved tween book of the same name, The Wild Robot follows the adventures of ROZZUM 7134, a k a Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a utilitarian robot in the future.
She crash-lands on a heavily wooded island, where she confronts the local wildlife.
After decoding the various animals’ languages, a la Doctor Doolittle, she tries to fulfill her mission of completing tasks. Finally, she finds one, as the foster parent to an orphaned Canada-goose gosling (there’s also a story as to how the gosling became an orphan).
Roz must exceed her initial programming to learn how to care for the gosling, named Brightbill, and prepare him for eventual goose migration.
It’s then that the story takes a bit of a sci-fi twist — which some have described as dystopian, but I didn’t really see that. There’s some peril for the geese and for Roz before The Wild Robot offers an emotionally satisfying, and slightly surprising, ending.
Love Me Some North American Wildlife, But …
I was very grateful to see that the story takes place among North American wildlife, like red foxes, black bears, whitetail deer, opossums, raccoons, cougars, and Canada geese.
Frankly, I’m over lions, tigers, giraffes, etc., in movies and TV. If only this story had taken place where there were bison and pronghorns!
Anyway, where the animals are concerned, this is not a story about them. It’s a story about people, who just look like animals. Otherwise, it makes no sense.
For example, at one point, Roz must rescue a bear from its den in the dead of winter — which is absurd. Bad winter or no, bears do just fine, hibernating away in their dens. Leave them alone.
There are also whitetail fawns in the winter. Yeah, no.
And all the animals wind up living together in Roz’s house, because kindness is a survival skill. Sure, it may be — among humans.
Unless you’re talking about an animal’s immediate family, pack or herd, in which creatures often (but not always) look after each other, kindness really doesn’t factor in much to surviving the wild.
But, if you remember that we’re actually looking at people with feathers, fur and four feet, it’s all good.
Motherhood and Talking to Chris Sanders
It’s also good that this fable actually has a mother in it. From Bambi to Finding Nemo, moms are often absent from animated fare.
That’s one of the things I discussed recently with Sanders. The whole interview is embedded below, but here’s an excerpt, on missing moms:
When I was a story artist, that’s where I learned my craft. That’s how I learned it. I was at Disney, and I was on the story team for Aladdin. Originally, that film had a mom, Aladdin had a mom, and she was eventually removed because first of all, moms know better in the best way possible.
They stopped stories from happening because they keep kids from making massive mistakes.
And you need your protagonist to be free to make mistakes and go on an adventure, and you don’t have to cut back to somebody who’s desperately looking for them, which Aladdin’s mom was for a while until we removed from the story.
At the core of this movie is a motherhood story, and that is absolutely unique. I think that’s one of the things that makes it so different, and one of the reasons I wanted to work on it.
Here’s the whole thing:
Is The Wild Robot Suitable for Families?
Absolutely — with a couple of provisos. There are some scenes of predation, played for laughs. Like, Roz pics up a crab and says hello, only to have a seagull snatch it. And a baby opossum appears to been eaten (spoiler alert, it wasn’t). This might bother some of the youngest viewers.
And, again, I wouldn’t recommend leaving kids with the impression that lions will actually lie down with lambs (or, in this case, bears and foxes with deer, rabbits and raccoons).
As for faith content, there isn’t any, but there is nothing anti-faith either — and there is a lot about appreciating the wonder of Creation.
Click here to get ticket info on The Wild Robot.
Image: The Wild Robot/Universal Pictures
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