After a shipwreck, an intelligent robot called Roz is stranded on an uninhabited island. To survive the harsh environment, Roz bonds with the island’s animals and cares for an orphaned baby goose.
“The Wild Robot” was first conceived in a best-selling book by Peter Brown but isn’t really “wild” in the commonly perceived sense of that word. The robot in the title role, ROZZUM Unit 7134, or Roz for short, is wild only because it is inexperienced in the world. She “wakes up” for the first time after being shipwrecked on a completely deserted island. Unaware of life and living, Roz knows only what she has been programmed to know – her “goal,” what she was created to achieve. However, she doesn’t know what that goal is in her current situation and has to learn about the world around her by scanning and experiencing it as she goes. She is awed by what she sees and encounters on the beautiful island where she landed, and Roz slowly begins to take in and assimilate all she comes across. The island is densely populated with all manner of wildlife – wild, as in untamed by humans. Here is where technology and nature crash head-on, sometimes literally.
In her exploration, Roz finds a tiny egg with a broken one in a nest. She determines the egg contains something that will eventually emerge and keeps it out of curiosity until it cracks and a tiny gosling appears. A sly fox (aren’t they all) hangs around, first hoping to eat the egg and, later, the little gosling. The newly hatched little guy looks at Roz and determines that she is his mother and that he won’t leave her. This presents a problem for Roz as the fox has now informed her that mothers are responsible for protecting their young in his world, the world of nature. Protecting the gosling is now her “goal.” A worn-out mother opossum named Pinktail appears with her huge brood of baby opossums, and as the “wise woman” in the tale, she counsels Roz on motherhood.
Roz accepts her new goal and initiates a relationship with the gosling named Brightbill. She constructs a pictograph of Brightbill’s growth and accomplishments. She builds a home to keep them safe, and the fox tags along with them. This is a process by which Roz, a total techno entity, slowly develops an awareness of herself as separate from her programming. She comes to realize she is more than a robot. Feelings have entered her, and with them come the associated highs and lows.
This film is beautiful, both in its story and in its visuals. The colors are stunning, never flashy or overdone. The characters, all the animals, are mostly cute, and even the bear and other big guys are not scary. Overall, the animation is astounding, the music is beautiful, and the character voices are beautifully representative. There seemed to be a bit of a slow time about three-quarters of the way through the film, and I sometimes wondered why Roz was so huge, but those considerations were so minor in the scheme of the movie as to be negligible. Brown wrote two sequels to “The Wild Robot,” and we can look forward to those stories.
In Theaters Friday, September 27th
