Learning to Fly — The Wild Robot
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly part of our lives, the biggest issue is that it’s presented to us as an automatic, universal good. Whether it’s tech companies like Google and Apple forcing it down our throats through their products and advertising (which we can’t opt out of even though we’ve given them little to no consent), executives trying to find avenues to replace human workers with machines, or the entertainment industry trying to convince you to root for it against flesh and blood people in movies and TV shows (The Creator, among others), there’s this overarching campaign to paint AI as an inherent positive, even though it’s a solution without a problem.
This runs counter to the very rules of our existence. We as a species evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, after billions of years of planetary development, to thrive in our environment to the point that we extricated ourselves from the food chain and gained sentience. In the modern day, many of our innovations are designed to fine tune our day-to-day lives or provide comfort and ease, rather than facilitate pure survival.
AI, on the other hand, shortcuts this lengthy process by just being fed information and supercharging the speed of calculations until it can approximate an experience from an amalgam, something it never had to learn on its own. As the human animal, we are taught essential behaviors and skills by several influences (parents, teachers, politicians, etc.), but eventually we have to start figuring stuff out for ourselves, to grow. The computational mechanism of AI skips that crucial, experiential step. Even if you’re super religious and don’t believe in the scientific concept of evolution, this still presents a problem, as the dominion given to us by the Almighty is now being supplanted by a digital god we’re meant to worship, an idol that exists solely for the profit of others. No matter how you look at it, the result is the same. The human element is removed, and because of that, everything surrounding it feels empty and false.
I say all this to call attention to why Dreamworks’ latest animated feature, The Wild Robot, is one of the best films of the year, a true marvel of visual storytelling that cuts to the heart — figurative and literal — of this societal conundrum. All machines, be they simple or complex, are tools to one extent or another. They are neither good nor bad, merely a function of their user’s intent and design. A plow is meant to till land. A calculator exists to speedily solve equations. A gun is designed to kill or maim a target. Whatever your personal feelings are about these or any other machines, that is their purpose. But what happens when a machine is allowed to experience things and overwrite that purpose? Do they become good or bad? Or do they just, live? That’s where this film — like WALL-E and The Iron Giant before it — finds its loving grace.
Sometime in the future, after a storm causes a shipment of personal robots to crash on a remote North American island, the local animal life accidentally activates one of the units, ROZZUM 7134 (“ROZZUM” being a reference to the 1920 play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, which brought the word “robot” into the lexicon), later shortened to “Roz.” She’s voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, and in the instant of her booting up, she only has the ability to view her surroundings and rely on her narrow programming. She and her entire line of androids are designed to perform any number of tasks assigned to them, so she seeks out those very tasks to complete. Loaded with several languages in her database, she attempts to communicate with the fauna to no avail. Because of this, she is forced to take her first independent action. In a sequence reminiscent of The 13th Warrior, Roz simply sits down and observes the wildlife for several days, extrapolating their various grunts, squeaks, chirps, and growls until she can parse together their “native tongue,” so to speak.
Honestly, this is something of an inspired touch, especially for people like me who obsess over these weird little details and dissect movie previews. In the first teaser released for the film, we saw Roz turn on and view a family of otters through her wide angle camera eyes, with no dialogue. This led a fair few people (myself included) to think that this might hew closer to WALL-E’s nearly silent first act, which is one of the most brilliant pieces of film ever conceived. When the full trailer was released, however, we got a ton of speaking, both from Roz and the animals, which worried me because I didn’t want this to just turn into Open Season or something lame like that, just with a robotic lead.
So by going down this route, writer-director Chris Sanders (adapting Peter Brown’s book series) gives us a reason for the animals to talk, but it’s so much more than just preemptively covering up a potential plot hole. For the kids in the audience, it’s a fun way to introduce the fantasy element. For the adults, it gives us permission to suspend our disbelief just a bit and engage with the action. But most importantly, it establishes how we’re meant to look at Roz as a character. For the first time, she’s forced to think about her problem and adjust to her surroundings. There is no protocol written into her neural network on how to handle this situation. She has some of the pieces, but not the whole puzzle, so she must figure it out on her own, through trial and error. If she wound up not understanding these woodland creatures, she’d be back at square one and forced to come up with another solution. That introduces both a human and animalistic element into Roz’s existence in an expedient manner so that we can care about what happens next, something so many AI-focused stories and product pitches have failed miserably to do over the last few years.
From there, Sanders, who previously wowed viewers with the likes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, flexes his animator muscles, with 15 minutes of exploration that is simply dazzling. Roz, still looking for some kind of directive, continues to observe the animals, mimic their behavior (there’s a delightful bit where she moves like a crab up a slippery rock wall near the shore, for instance), and get the lay of the land. All of this is directed with the zeal of Brad Bird directing an action sequence in The Incredibles. The camera movements, the lighting effects, and the dynamic motion of the character are all extremely fast-paced, but also focused and disciplined, so that even when the view flips upside down, we still know where everyone is and where they’re going. It’s not like the vine surfing bit from Tarzan. It’s much more fluid and natural, keeping the reality of the world in proper perspective, rather than just being a visual gimmick.
As she starts to understand her predicament, Roz looks for a place on the island high enough to send out a distress signal so that her manufacturer can recover her and take her back to headquarters for repairs. However, in the process, she accidentally destroys a goose nest, killing the mother bird and breaking all of the eggs save one. After Roz recovers the egg from a hungry fox, it hatches and the newborn gosling instantly imprints on her. Roz then encounters an opossum named Pinktail (voiced by Catherine O’Hara), who with her own young in tow informs her that she now has a “task.” This infant bird considers her to be his mother, so she must ensure his survival, including teaching it to eat, swim, and eventually fly before it’s time for the fall migration. Still somewhat at a loss and trying to quickly take in as much information as possible, Roz then befriends the fox, named Fink (Pedro Pascal), who agrees to help her raise the gosling, later named Brightbill (Kit Connor), and promises not to eat him.
This dynamic perfectly shifts the tone and pace of the story, from one of survival and adaptation to one of guardianship and mentoring, which again rightly goes against the AI model. Knowledge is meant to be passed on, whether it’s through lore, experience, calculation, or historical record. The problem with artificial intelligence is that it is incapable of doing that properly. All it can do is regurgitate what’s been inputted, and that doesn’t always work. This is why you can google something and get results that make absolutely no sense. For example, as part of my normal work a few months back, I searched for “Baby Boomer Celebrities,” and among my results was the text of “Billy Joel,” but it was accompanied by a picture of “Weird Al” Yankovic. Searching the inverse, “Millennial Celebrities” yielded “Jennifer Lawrence” represented by a photo of Robert Pattinson. This is just data that’s being spat back out because the computer thinks there’s some relevant connection, because it’s not actually learning any information, merely storing it.
For Roz, Fink, and Brightbill on the other hand, they learn by reconciling the data with the actuality of their experience. Roz has figured out how to maintain her functions despite losing several components and body parts thanks to the animals who think she’s a “monster,” Fink supplements with his firsthand knowledge and instinctual behavior, and the sum of this is transferred down to Brightbill, with adjustments based on the youngling’s level of capability. This is demonstrated early on as the baby version (voiced by Boone Storme) is unable to sleep, so Fink makes up a story about how he came to them as a means to let him drift off happily, something Roz doesn’t know how to do until she witnesses it, because she’s not programmed to know it. It’s the difference between figuratively “reading the room” as Fink does, using intuition and empathy to come up with the proper course of action, and literally “scanning the room” as Roz would do.
This eventually results in Brightbill becoming a capable adolescent goose who has some skills while also speaking in adorable technobabble. It also makes for a crisis of identity when it turns out that he doesn’t know how to interact with other geese, who mock him for being a runt and a weirdo. But this is also part of the process of learning and adapting. Roz can only teach him so much, and she has to learn when to let him make his own mistakes, as well as when she herself needs assistance. That’s where the likes of Fink, Pinktail, a beaver called Paddler (Matt Berry), a falcon named Thunderbolt (Ving Rhames), and an elder goose named Longneck (Bill Nighy) come into play. What’s that adage about it taking a village again?
The movie itself does have some flaws here and there, mostly in the third act. The story goes a bit off the rails, with much more of a focus on escalating action and the introduction of an antagonist that I don’t really think was needed. It’s fine for what it is, but it doesn’t really serve the overall plot other than to create suspense and pad the runtime. I’m fine with it, though, because it leads to a satisfying ending that is just gorgeous to look at, but also because the film gives its young target audience an extreme amount of intellectual credit, to the point that the climax feels more like a palate cleanser than anything with actual stakes.
See, despite all the technological advancements on display here, the script feels like it was plucked out of the 1980s, in the sense that it’s a PG flick that feels like what PG was back then. There are some pretty dark and blunt jokes littered throughout. The food chain is very much a concern, to the point that a winter truce has to be initiated for the sake of mutual survival. There’s an absolutely side-splitting gag about how possums play dead and how some parents in the wild simply eat their young. Brightbill’s runt status is constantly at the forefront, because given the cruelty of nature, even if Roz accomplishes her objectives, he still might not make it.
This picture is unbelievably honest about all this, and it’s another refreshing subversion of the algorithm. Under normal circumstances, a product like this would be focus group tested to death, with several levels of corporate suits telling Sanders how to tell this story in the safest, most profitable way possible. Years of cold, analytical research has created the very formula that most family films abide by, with the money men very happy that the charts prove them right because they followed the charts.
But Sanders didn’t do that here. He gave us a dead parent, but showed the death. He gave us a “liar revealed” moment, but infused it with nuance to show that sometimes dishonesty has value and that it’s not always a binary issue. He cast A-list celebrities (including Stephanie Hsu and Mark Hamill alongside the others I’ve mentioned), but the focus was on having the proper voices to fit the characters, not just shoehorning in famous actors for the sake of the poster even though most of the kids don’t know who these people are. He let Brightbill almost get killed several times so that we could feel the triumph when he finally did figure out how to fly. It’s a journey, an adventure, this thing called life, and nothing is served if we rely on a machine to simply tell us what we want to hear so we can continue to clutch pearls over the next generation’s fragile psyches. Instead of wailing, “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?!” Sanders opted to let the children think for themselves, and *gasp* ask for PARENTAL GUIDANCE if needed.
When I watched The Wild Robot, I sat in a theatre that had several families with children. You know what the result of this “gamble” was? Laughter. Pure, unadulterated laughter. The kids reveled in the darker jokes. They giggled at the more shocking moments. And rather than worry, their parents were able to laugh right along with them. They observed, they learned, they processed, and when it was all said and done, they reacted in a way that a computer likely couldn’t predict.
That’s what makes this a special film despite some late shortfalls. It’s not necessarily bad or wrong to have a story about artificial intelligence, but you can’t operate under the assumption that something synthetic is innately better than something genuine and organic. Sanders appears to understand that fact, and because of that, he was able to deliver something that presents as rigid and pre-programmed, but ultimately feels more real and human than most of us could have expected. Is it perfect? No. But neither is life. And I think that’s the point.
Grade: A-
Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Where does this rank among your favorite robo-flicks? Would you ever want a personal utility android? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on October 1, 2024.
