‘The Wild Robot’ Finds Beloved Community in an Ecosystem of Predators

It’s the rare children’s film that opens with a bloodbath. Not since Bambi  has an animated film featured so much animal peril in the first 30 minutes as DreamWorks’ latest film, The Wild Robot. The titular Robot (Lupita Nyong’o, bringing a delightful balance of artifice and whimsy) awakens on an island. She is a service android, designed to fulfill tasks given to her by human owners. But as she wanders the island, inquiring whether anyone has a task she can fulfill, she wades into the middle of the circle of life — the delicate, ferocious dance between predators and their prey. A wave crashes against her, washing her into the ocean. Another wave threatens to dash her against the rocks, but she escapes by imitating a crab that crawls up the cliff face. She takes the crab into her hand to marvel at her tiny savior, only to have it snatched by a hungry gull. Everywhere she turns, one animal feasts on another, far too quickly for her to save them all. In this world where only the fittest survive, can a robot’s commitment to help without agenda possibly work?

The Wild Robot, in theaters Sept. 27, is a powerful, poignant meditation on the way kindness opens the possibility for humankind to supersede our biological tendency toward exclusion and cruelty. With stellar vocal performances and beautiful, immersive animation, the film is a must-see fairy tale for our time.

Our very creatureliness seems to argue against the possibility of genuine connection across tribal lines. In the face of increasingly apparent divisions in our culture, the biological and social sciences warn that our tendency to divide into groups may be our evolutionary destiny. Though the exact number is debated (it’s called Dunbar’s number), sociologists generally agree that human brains only evolved to hold about 150 meaningful connections. We literally can’t care about more people than that — at least not in the same way we care about our family or community. 

Paul describes the produce of a spiritual life as virtues like love, peacemaking, gentleness, and kindness (Galatians 5:22-23). A life marked by such virtues seems ill-equipped to survive, let alone thrive, in a world where humans are the most dangerous animal. Are we doomed to in-group loyalty? Is it simply not scientifically possible for us to be kind on a macro level? 

In his masterwork, “In Memoriam, A.H.H.,” 19th-century English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote of this tension between our religious impulses and our creaturely nature: 

Who trusted God was love indeed 
And love Creation’s final law -- 
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed. 

“Nature, red in tooth and claw” certainly describes the nameless island on which Roz (the name the Robot chooses) finds herself. The thrilling, extended opening sequence culminates in Roz fleeing from a bear, accidentally killing a mother goose and all but one of her eggs in the process. When the final egg hatches, the gosling imprints on Roz, and she decides to raise him — here, finally is a customer she can serve! 

A wily fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) cautions Roz against trying to raise the gosling, who she names Brightbill. “Kindness,” he warns, “is not a survival skill.” And in case we thought to wonder why he would so kindly give unsolicited advice, he licks his lips, imagining the feast a defenseless gosling would make. 

Can Roz keep Brightbill alive in a world full of teeth and claws? Can a robot teach a goose the skills he needs to be a goose — including flight and migration? And what of the rest of the animals on the island? How will they react to one among them who refuses the law of the jungle?  

The norms of empire mirror the law of the jungle. From Babylon to Rome to the Crusades to the terror of U.S. drone warfare, humans are a rare, dangerous type of apex predator: We turn our own into prey. By building systems that separate us from each other — borders and mass incarceration, for instance, it becomes easier to think of another human as an “Other” — expendable beings less deserving of love. 

Religion, at its best, is a system humans created to supersede our genetics, our biological programming. When James tells us that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress,” he hasn’t merely identified random groups of humans (James 1:27). The reason widows, orphans, the poor, and immigrants are the social categories the prophets regularly single out is because, in a society organized by patriarchal governance, they are the categories of people who often do not have social protection. 

To determine whether a system is functioning, we don’t examine the strongest points, but the weakest. If the weakest, most vulnerable parts of a system are working, then the system is healthy. But if the system is broken, the first and most obvious signs will appear at the weak points. The justice of social systems, then, can be measured by how well the most vulnerable are flourishing.

James disagrees with Fink the fox: Kindness is necessary for human flourishing. The Greek word chrestotes describes the spiritual fruit of kindness, pointing to a virtue wholly oriented toward the good of the Other. Our English word is rooted in the concept of kinship; a kind person treats the Other not as an outsider but a family member. The pure and undefiled religion James advocates is a system we can call kindness. Good religion liberates us from the systems of sectarianism and exclusion to embrace the whole human family as our own family.

To translate the religious to the scientific, when we learn how to uplift the most vulnerable in society, we have evolved as a species. In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200,000 Years of Human Evolution, evolutionary biologist Cat Bohannon explains how institutions — at least the pure and undefiled ones — can help humans overcome our biological programming: 

The best thing any human being can do requires all of our uniquely human traits: an amalgam of our extended kinship behavior, narrative building, and problem solving. The best thing we do is create institutions to support and protect those fragile extended bonds. And those institutions, like them or not, are precisely what allow us to overcome our less desirable behaviors: territoriality, sexism, competition for dominance. They are the way we push beyond the limitations of our bodies’ evolution. They are the means by which we become truly free.  

In The Wild Robot, Roz arrives on a wild island with a set of programming that seems destined to fail. She cannot live by the law of the jungle in which she finds herself. What a joy it is to watch her transform an ecosystem of predators and prey into a beloved community.