The Wild Robot:
The conservation hero we need right now

A robot wakes up on a wild, untamed island.

That’s the starting point of Dreamworks’ animated science fiction survival film, The Wild Robot, which topped the US and global box office on its opening weekend.

Directed by Chris Sanders, the story follows a gangly metallic robot called Roz on her journey from trying to fend for herself, to accepting that she must understand and befriend the island’s animal inhabitants in order to survive.

Early reviews are calling it not just the best animated movie of 2024, but one of the best DreamWorks movies of all time (and when you’re up against the How To Train Your Dragon and Shrek movies, that’s high praise, indeed).

It’s a delight to watch the wilding of a robot, as Roz moves from being a machine, with all the robotic personality traits we would associate with… a robot, to become a warmer being with feelings and desires. It could be interpreted as an allegory for the rewilding that the city-dwellers among us could benefit from. It’s about the movement from traditional, more staid ideas of what is proper towards more primal and natural ways to live. Think about rewilding your pristine lawn in order to provide native plants in a natural ecosystem for local wildlife.

While most people in the audience won’t be buying their tickets expressly for the pro-environment theme, it’s a fantastic thing for sustainability advocates that a movie this popular carries that message so effortlessly. How do we coexist with the natural world? How, indeed.

The Wild Robot’s star Lupita Nyong’o is speaking up for nature

The film’s marketing campaign includes a video from its star, Lupita Nyong’o (who voices Roz) promoting the sustainability message that courses through The Wild Robot. That’s not a new thing for the Oscar-winning actress – she has also campaigned with Greenpeace for using less plastic. It makes sense that an environmentally conscious film attracted an equally conscientious lead.

Nyong’o talks about how “nature is all around us”, and how she likes to explore her neighborhood looking for new plants and animals. There are also suggestions to eat more veggies, clean up your local park or plant a pollinator garden. In a film made for tweens and above, this is incredibly important and powerful messaging for the demographic of the future to devour.

By virtue of the main character being a software-powered machine, however, The Wild Robot is also, inevitably, about artificial intelligence. In fact, the movie landed in theaters just as it was announced that Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania – whose partial meltdown in 1979 was one of the worst disasters on American soil – is being fired up once again. Microsoft is the sole client. Why does Microsoft need so much more electricity? Artificial intelligence.

The large language model software that underpins AI technology uses an enormous amount of energy, and as a result AI is using up Earth’s resources faster than any other tech. Even if AI’s carbon footprint wasn’t on the radar of author Peter Brown when he wrote the book on which The Wild Robot is based back in 2016, it must have been on the minds of the filmmakers. Can this kind of technological progress coexist with the planet? It’s something for our squishy human brains to think about.

Can a robot teach us to be more human?

This isn’t the first sci-fi cartoon about robots, of course. We’ve had Wall-E and its stark – yet ultimately hopeful – commentary on a similarly-polluted future planet ravaged by the effects of consumerism. We’ve had Big Hero 6, whose cuddly robot star is nurse, therapist, and superhero rolled into one. And we’ve had The Iron Giant with its messages about how we can choose to be peaceful and inclusive, even when bestowed with the power to destroy anything and everything (for the other extrapolation of that story, see the Terminator series.)

Is it that we’ve historically ignored the negative consequences of our actions? Or maybe it’s that we are so filled with hope for maybe one day choosing the correct path, that the alternative isn’t worth dwelling on?

It’s stories like The Wild Robot that remind us that even as humanity creates new challenges for itself on the path to a liveable future, coexisting with the natural world will always be necessary, and always be possible.