The Wild Robot asks what makes us human

In the opening scene of the visually stunning animated movie The Wild Robot (directed by Chris Sanders based on the book by Peter Brown), a family of playful otters bob and dive in a small island inlet. Their curious faces and thrashing bodies are framed in the reflective surface of the eyes of a strange robotic figure, still half-encased in its smashed cargo case, battered by waves in the rough surf. As the otters climb all over the metal creature, sniffing and gnawing, one of them accidentally turns it on, and Rozzum 7134—Roz for short (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o)—springs to life. Roz knows that she is part of a new line of home helper robots developed by Universal Dynamics, a shadowy tech conglomerate, and she assumes that whoever turned her on is her new customer. Following her programming, she is eager to find her owner and complete her first task.

Roz speaks dozens of human languages, but she cannot understand any of the living creatures she encounters. She powers into “learning mode” and absorbs the chattering, squeaking, and growls of her new woodland companions until she can communicate with them. This doesn’t mean she understands them. As she crashes and bumbles through delicate ecosystems, she leaves a wake of destruction, including orphaning a runt gosling who is late to hatch from his nest. He imprints on her, as goslings do, and Roz acquires her first task—teach him to swim and fly and keep him alive until he can join the fall migration.

Animated movies anthropomorphize all kinds of things—most often animals, but also ordinary objects like teapots and carpets—to stand in as proxies for humans or to act as their friends, guides, or foils in order to teach human viewers something about ourselves. Because there are no human characters in The Wild Robot, Roz occupies a strange in-between role in the allegory of the animated characters. She is partially a human proxy, the product of human intelligence and design, representing human imperatives that are out of place in a wild landscape. Reflecting the human ends for which she was built, she is obsessed with efficiency and calculation. “A Rozzum always completes its task,” she repeats with confident optimism as she stomps through the luscious natural landscape of the island. She is programmed to treat every biological creature she encounters as a potential customer, assessing its needs and calculating how she could maximize its life.