Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead.
The Wild Robot is perhaps the most transformative movie I have ever watched. I was talking to my good friend, Al Gore, and he told me something very interesting: “Family isn’t an obligation, but instead a choice.” I think that the 2000 election changed him. Afterwards, he never smiled and he never wept; he simply stood. He no longer thought that the people of America were his family. He no longer championed the climate for which he had fought so hard to protect or the people of the country that betrayed him.
Much like a hanging chad, his life was perpetually suspended in limbo, an uneasy balance between the death of his soul and the very alive body which so indignantly propelled him through time. I tell you about Al not to paint a tragedy but to make a point. I spent years trying to pull him out of that slump and I couldn’t do it. It took something bigger, it took someone better; we needed The Wild Robot.
The Wild Robot starts with a simple premise: what if a robot was taken out of its environment? 2000 pounds of steel and wiring is dumped in the forest in the form of Roz, and immediately the entire woodland community hates her. This cleverly references the reaction of Glen Falls, Vermont when I dumped 2000 pounds of steel and wiring there. The Wild Robot gears you up in the first couple minutes for a heartwarming story about living in a community, examining your biases, and environmentalism above all. That is not what this movie is about.
The Wild Robot delivers a series of sucker punches. The first of which is that unlike WALL-E and The Terminator, there is no sci-fi eco-fable happening; this is a movie about the struggles of parenting. Perhaps this is only shocking if you haven’t seen the trailer. When Al and I walked into the theater that Saturday afternoon, we certainly had not. It’s jarring, but it isn’t bad. You’re going to spend the next 2 hours watching a robot raise a goose. You watch Roz and the goosling grow to form a family. By the end, the payoff of Brightbill leaving the nest is earned (in a way that Bush’s presidency certainly was not).
A lesser movie would end here – not The Wild Robot. In the last half hour, The Wild Robot has no less than 3 movie-ending emotional payoffs. Al’s reaction was something to see. The first payoff hits when Brightbill migrates south, leaving Roz behind. Looking right for but a moment, I see a single tear roll down Mr. Gore’s face, the first hint of emotion he’s betrayed since November 7th, 24 years ago.
And before you can recover… BAM!! Payoff number 2: every carnivore and herbivore in the forest has been stuffed together into a little room and they’re all attacking each other. Roz, perhaps powering down for good, makes a speech with the last morsel of energy she can muster from her fuel cells. The fighting stops, the animals lay quiet, and Al Gore texts his children for the first time in 14 years. He’s smiling – he’s actually smiling! Roz has succeeded not only in stopping the conflict in the forest but also the conflict in our beloved 45th Vice President’s heart.
BAM!! Not even 5 minutes later, they do it again. At this point I must admit that I lied earlier; this is an eco-fable after all. The Rozzum corporation attacks the forest and nearly burns it to the ground. Fighting back, the community of animals bands together against this ALeGOREy for consumerism, rampant exploitant of the environment through industrial processes, and unenlightened technocentrism. It is then that Roz says the line: “I am a Wild Robot”.
Upon hearing this, Al, who was now bouncing with excitement in his seat, simply died. The EMTs who arrived on the scene could not help as they were too transfixed by Dreamwork’s newest release in IMAX 3D. I am told that his carotid artery burst, the tragic downside of his heart growing three sizes that day.
I tried to weep but could not. Al had lived more in those twenty minutes than I had seen him live in twenty years. This is how he would want to be remembered. He would want you to know what he’d seen. He would want you to know, even if only for a moment, that he was alive.
