55020: The Wild Robot

In 1816, 18 year-old Marry Shelley tapped into her culture's inchoate fears of the burgeoning advancements in science and the threat they posed to humanity, and created one of the all-time great works of literature, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Her work has terrorized us for two centuries with dire warnings about what happens when our scientific reach exceeds our grasp. I wonder what she would think about artificial intelligence. Would she have written The Terminator, or Blade Runner? Perhaps she would've written a better version of Wish. (Google "Disney Wish AI" for more on that) I doubt that she would look at artificial intelligence and come up with something as heartwarming, tender, and uplifting as The Wild Robot, but I'm so glad that someone did.

Let's get some things out of the way: The Wild Robot is a near-perfect film. And I only call it "near" perfect because I haven't gone back to rewatch it yet. In terms of recent animated films, I put it up there with Coco or Frozen. It is visually lush and inventive and stylish in a way that big animated films just aren't anymore. Not to take anything away from The Garfield Movie, but it doesn't really take any big swings in terms of visuals. The voice acting was stellar. Anyone who has seen Us or The Mandalorian knows that Lupita Nyong'o and Pedro Pascal can deliver truly arresting voice work (having Mark Hamill and Catherine O'Hara didn't hurt, either), and The Wild Robot gives them both the room to explore these characters and their (artificial) emotional arcs.

Now, if you come to animated films for the big musical numbers, you won't find any here. So, there's that.

However, if you're looking for a uniquely heartfelt science fiction film that explores the ideas of climate change and artificial intelligence without getting preachy or threatening, then you're in luck. Where did the robot come from? Where did it land? What is the world like now? WHAT YEAR IS IT?! We get hints of answers, but those aren't the questions The Wild Robot is interested in answering. We don't get a Star Wars-style text crawl at the beginning, or a Blade Runner-ish voice over to set us up in this world. We're literally dropped into a lightning storm *cough* Frankenstein *cough* and washed up, along with the titular robot, on a Pacific Northwesty island populated by animals and no humans. That's the tabula rasa we're shown, and it's all we need.

The robot, ROZ, sets about searching for meaning in this world. Who is she? What is she made to do? Who will tell her? What's her task? Watching her fumble her way through the wild world is cute, and if that's as far as the movie went, it would make a delightful Pixar short. But that's not what The Wild Robot is about. ROZ is an instrument of civilization, a tool for maintaining the comfort of humans, and for keeping the more nasty/short/brutish elements of life at bay. But now she's in a place where comfort doesn't stretch past a full belly and a warm den. Her attempts to bring civilization to the wild lead to chaos among the animals on the island.

The bulk of the story picks up after ROZ "rescues" an egg from a goose nest and becomes the fully imprinted mother figure for a runt of a gosling. This runt becomes her charge but also her boss. Her reason for existence (if an artificial life form can be said to exist) is to protect this gosling and teach it how to survive. As is pointed out several times in the film, nature would have this weakling eaten immediately—probably by Pascal's Fox, who becomes ROZ's accomplice in raising the baby, Bright Bill. ROZ, however, will not allow herself to fail in a task. And so, we have the fundamental conflict between nature and civilization. It's like H.G. Wells and Jack London got ahold of some absinthe and a typewriter and they banged out a collab under the Northern Lights.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that, after some emotional growth by all parties, Bright Bill learns how to swim and fly and saves the day. It's a kids' movie after all, and not an Old Yeller kind of story. But, what's important to me—and what might've been glossed over in the first sentence of this paragraph—is that ROZ has an emotional arc in this story. She develops emotions. She rebels against her programming in a plot twist that is as emotionally satisfying as it is predictable.

Could she, though? Nerds with lots of money tell us that AI is incapable of developing emotions, preferences, dreams, and all that. They say it can't surpass its programming. But isn't that what Victor Frankenstein would've said about his do-it-yourself creation kit? Isn't that what Hammond says about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Life finds a way, right? Is that true for canned life as well?

I think about the large language models, and how they "learn" by positive and negative feedback, and grow more complex and capable as they take in more and more data and feedback. How is that different from children? Is a neural network a neural network? Is it only different because we can pull the plug? What happens if we lose our grip on the chain? I just hope that whatever is on the other end is as caring and gentle as ROZ.

Go see The Wild Robot, it's probably going to be streaming on Peacock or something soon.