AdamsFavourites ✝️ 🎄’s review published on Letterboxd:
I‘m very mixed on this film.
On the one hand, I quite like the animation style, especially the shots of the burning forest and ocean shoreline. And the score is very beautiful, as is common to most Dreamworks films.
On the other hand, contrary to the hope I held throughout the film‘s runtime, by the end I couldn‘t deny that this is another film about transcending, even denying, our nature or programming. It‘s a theme of which I‘ve grown quite tired.
This film is hardly the most egregious example of this theme. Roz‘s desire to protect Bright Bill the goose and help him grow after accidentally killing his family is inherently noble. And unlike many portrayals of this ostensible ideal, Roz‘s intentions can‘t be called selfish. She’s geared toward self-sacrifice, not an urge to rebel for its own sake.
Still, some of the ways this theme is expressed is odd to me. Beyond the more obvious example of artificial intelligence as a emotional rather than logically pre-programmed entity, perhaps the most peculiar instance is the movie‘s belief that predator and prey ought to overcome their differences in order to survive the winter. It wants us to believe that they‘re more than their natural biology. Of course, the movie is merely using animals as stand-ins for how humans should behave. And this to me is a prime example of the problem.
I am sympathetic to the belief that our personal and subjective experiences should form the basis of our life choices. When one believes that life is short, it‘s only natural that one would want to live it to the fullest, whatever that person perceives that to be. But ultimately, I think it‘s a mistake. It‘s a mistake to take our secondary characteristics, the things which make us unique, and attempt to make them primary characteristics. That‘s not how nature works. Nature is neither one massive dollop, nor is it a purely existential experience without essential purposes. Rather it is a unity formed in difference; our unique traits work together to form a coherent whole and are thus secondary to our commonalities. To be a human being means something; it means just as much, and perhaps more, than being an individual person.
And the movie does provide inklings of this idea: when the badger cuts through the biggest tree in the forest and helps to put out the fire, when the possums play dead as a defense mechanism, and when Roz completes her objectives we are able to witness characters taking pride in their personal characteristics. There are great secondary themes here about working together, motherhood and natural conservation. Unfortunately, the movie ultimately sides with the belief that our natural predispositions are not enough, that we ought to be more than what we are.
But there‘s nothing wrong with being predator or prey. There‘s nothing wrong with being a robot that follows its programming or a goose that acts like a goose without “thinking like a robot“. I don‘t mean to place people in boxes, but there’s power in design. It is precisely in the essential nature of our differences that we find our strength, and I wish that the modern world would stop believing that fate and inherent purpose are some great evil.
In many ways, The Wild Robot is a good, even great movie, but it falls victim to that modern trap: the belief that an innate inclination is some form of limitation to overcome. Ironically, it‘s a belief so common to modern film, in animation and non-animation alike, that it‘s become almost a second nature.
