Saw The Wild Robot at the cinema. I thought I saw some themes in it possibly worth exploring, noted here for future reference (so not many full sentences below). Spoilers!

Moral robots: Roz is good, because ‘it ‘/she does things that we think of as morally good. But these things are of two types:
– things done as a non-human servant: self-sacrifice (robots lay themselves down happily for the greater good, as the TI in T2, or mine-clearing robots), a solution for every problem, infinite patience and endurance beyond human capacities.
– human flourishing and development: Roz is celebrated for her ability to go beyond her programming and learn to think, to improvise, to develop her own moral project (initially described as being able to set herself a ‘task’, but she moves beyond that), to have a strong moral code (this is an extension or development of the robotics law ‘people – in this case animals – are more important than robots’) that means you should look after other’s interests, even if they are afraid and run away from you, to be a good parent, and to recognise feelings of friendship and love.
This second type is connected with being in the ‘wild’, as opposed to the factory where the humans live, and so there’s another moral claim being made: that the wild is the source of, or appropriate field/venue for, human moral values, rather than the human environment, which is artificial and dependent on plantation-like relationships between robots, which are not capable of thinking for themselves. Kind of a fall-from-nature, state of grace, trope in conjunction with a more contemporary privileging of notions like ‘feral’ or ‘rewilding’.

American patterns of life: there are high-school bullies, the young child’s narrative is all about being different and not fitting in, the parent’s is similar but with added notes of martyrdom and self-sacrifice (made more plausible by being a robot, as above), the success they experience is not just finding a place but – despite being too modest to imagine it – winning, being the best: the goose doesn’t just manage the impossible task of joining the migration but becomes their leader, bringing them to safety and home; Roz ends up a kind of spiritual leader in a god-like role, and eventually sacrifices themselves for the good of the community as a kind of spiritual martyr, a third form of self-sacrifice in addition to the robotic and parental kinds noted above. She leaves one form of mechanistic programming (the subservient task-seeking-and-completing of Universal Dynamics’ techno-plantation) for another (being a good mom). This is so tedious, and I am completely bored by the failure to imagine alternatives – not just the boring choice to map human relationships to whatever we think robots are, but the inability to imagine freedom from American ways of living.

References: the model is a Rossum, which is a reference to Rossums’ Universal Robots. But in that play the robots rise up and overthrow human society, so it’s an odd choice for a company manufacturing docile robots. Roz looks like the robots from the Ghibli Castle in the Sky film. The city looks like Tatsushi Morimoto’s work from the 1980s. Promotional material from the company borrows from Tomorrowland – it’s odd to still use this as a sign that we’re in the actual future (as opposed to a knowingly-retro version), and it’s a contrast with the image of a sunken Golden Gate Bridge, which seems to come from a different tradition. Though why shouldn’t they be together – why shouldn’t the bridge be drowned in Disney’s future? It undermines the techno-colonialism of Tomorrowland – having them both present offers the possibility of a critique of this 1950s future.

Other things: I didn’t understand the ending – the young goose finds Roz in the city, working, and they look up as the geese migrate for another year. So did she wilfully hand back her reason and flourishing for the sake of the others? If so, what are the geese to her? And has her son, crippled in his earlier rescue mission, foregone the life he worked so hard for? How is this ending anything but tragic, a double failure and a life with a mother only half herself? Or is some impossible rescue planned, made possible by someone daring to dream? All these possibilities are depressing.

Art and character design were amazing, really beautiful throughout, music a bit much sometimes but generally quite pretty, robot moves and capacities super thoughtful and well-done, and as a parent anticipating the departure of my own children and struggling with the job of preparing them to leave me, it was a real effort not to weep solidly throughout, even as I fumed at the US-centric notions of family and childhood. There were some really interesting moment: the process of Roz spending months or years in ‘learning mode’ in order to learn animal speech was smart, and the moment where she uses the movements she’s picked up from her animal colleagues to escape the city robots was genuinely moving. Underneath the unoriginal ugly-duckling/high-school/parenthood tropes, there’s a hint of a story I’d love to see more of, a robot develoing its own non-human way of being in the world.