“The Wild Robot” and the Problem with Metaphor

Fink the fox and Roz the robot in Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot

Chris Sanders (writer/director), The Wild Robot

When the service robot identified only as Roz washes ashore on a rugged Pacific Northwest island, it wants one thing: instructions. It races around the island, pestering wildlife with its preprogrammed spiel of helpfulness, cheer, and obedience. The animals won’t have it. Until circumstances make Roz responsible for an orphaned hatchling goose, which imprints on it as his mother. Suddenly Roz has purpose and a mission.

This film’s creators intended a message. Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a complete cypher, even to herself, until nurturing the gosling Brightbill defines her. A local fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), initially sees Brightbill as an easy appetizer, but Rox manages to turn him into an ally. As the island’s wild inhabitants teach Roz to become a mother goose, they also learn together to overcome their natural enmities and live in trust.

For its intended audience of older children and their parents, this inclusive, communitarian message should ring true. I appreciate the intention behind it. The thesis, that nobody on the island is beholden to their natures, and can unify to protect their homeland against encroaching human technology, seems timely. As powerful forces in American society find creative ways to divide citizens and enflame culture-war animosities, the moral of overcoming division matters.

I enjoyed the underlying conceit. In less judicious hands, Roz could’ve become needlessly messianic, especially in later scenes, when her manufacturers try to reclaim her from a flying platform, literally on high. But Roz isn’t a messiah; like Paddington Bear, her guileless attempt to manufacture a place in life inspires those around her to evaluate their own choices. She makes everyone better, not through exhortation, but through simplicity and action.

However, there we encounter the problem with this storytelling approach. Linguist George Lakoff contends that human communication depends heavily on metaphor, the comparison of one form to another. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. (That’s a simile, yes; bear with me.) Dickinson doesn’t contend hope is a literal bird, but that it has sufficient bird-like qualities to bear the comparison, which she justifies in succeeding stanzas.

But any metaphor, pushed sufficiently hard, breaks down. Is hope migratory? Does it hunt or scavenge or live on carrion? Is hope a sweet songbird or an aggressive Canada goose? Metaphors are, by necessity, inexact, and don’t support extensive scrutiny. Many birds are dangerous to handle, bear diseases, and could kill humans. They also have a frustrating tendency to leave at predictable intervals, which undermines Dickinson’s metaphor.

This movie presents the differences between animal species as something Roz can overcome through honesty and innocence. The animals that disparage Roz for her attempts to teach Brightbill to fly come around to her position, slowly at first, simply because Roz’s need for purpose inspires them. Eventually, they learn to trust her enough that she inspires them to trust one another and huddle together during a violent winter storm.

Except, animals aren’t human communities, which could hypothetically pause their divisions to work together. The movie shows predators like foxes and grizzly bears consciously choosing not to eat prey animals—something they cannot do, because their digestive tracts can’t process vegetable matter. I’m reminded of Timothy Treadwell, the notorious Grizzly Man, who thought his big-heartedness defended him from grizzly bear attacks. Spoilers: the bears he loved killed him.

The broken metaphor leaves me struggling. We need the message of overcoming inherited divisions to resist the corporate invaders who would steal our resources. From Bacon’s Rebellion to today, wealthy oligarchs profit when they keep ordinary people divided and belligerent. This movie tells audiences that, supported by a shared purpose, we can overcome those divisions and unite to protect our island from the third-act invasion.

But it conveys that message in language that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Grizzly bears aren’t disobedient puppies which need trained out of their aggression; they are muscular predators whose consumption serves an important role in forest ecosystems. Anthropomorphizing animals works well in movies like Disney’s Robin Hood, which shows animals outside their habitat, enacting human roles. The forested island ecosystem behind the story undermines this division and gives false ideas.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This movie has received accolades for its storytelling, visual design, and message, and I wouldn’t take anything away. But misplaced metaphors give honest, well-meaning people like Treadwell false ideals about how nature works. The idea that predators can stop being predators because they learned from an honest, naïve ingenue, teaches child audiences falsely optimistic lessons about how animals, and possibly human societies, work.