Drive In Saturday Movie Review (on Wednesday): Wild Robot (2024)

The Drive-In Saturday Movie review series is, of course, named after the Bowie song, but often has little more than that related to Bowie. For more Bowie, come back tomorrow…

Movie: Wild Robot (2024)
Bowie Connection: This movie is not about Bowie, does not star or feature Bowie, includes no Bowie music, and does not depict Bowie. And yet… The main character is a rebellious robot (named Roz) that does not accept its place in the world, engages in others not like itself, and bears a scuff mark that reminded me of the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt. Although I have not read this anywhere, I’m guessing that the similarity was deliberate, to subtly invoke the “Rebel Rebel” spirit. As I was watching the movie, I was also thinking of the cover art for Queen’s News of the World, which featured a giant robot that was itself an adaptation of the cover art of a 1950s science fiction magazine. When I got home and pulled up an image of the album…eh, it isn’t as close as I thought. But nonetheless, something about Roz made me think of it, so take a look at the triptych I assembled above and judge for yourself.

Experience: We returned to the Jericho Drive-In, which is my favorite because of its excellent ice cream stand. Now, though we’re experiencing a warmer-than-normal period in mid-October here in the Albany, New York area, it still is getting chilly at night, so we watched the movie in the car. It wasn’t so chilly that I didn’t get my sundae. I’ve been trying to go through the different sundaes rather than just rely on what I would normally gravitate toward, and this week it was a Nutella sundae, which was excellent. The sundae was all the better because it was the one dessert I allowed myself this week. The other thing about this experience is that, now that the sun goes down earlier, and since we only stayed for one movie, we didn’t get home exhausted. I want to squeeze as many drive-in experiences as I can get out of the remainder of the season— there won’t be many more, but this was overall a very pleasant evening.

Movie Review: Most of this movie takes place on an island, inhabited only by animals. I don’t think we see a single human for the duration of the movie. At one point, late in the story, a flock of geese leaves the island to migrate to warmer weather before the onset of winter, and we catch a glimpse of a submerged San Francisco and other signs that the planet has undergone a climate catastrophe. That’s not the main point of the story, but it was a visual sign that the movie is about more than the cartoon antics of a wild robot.

Actually, there might have been too many subsurface themes of the movie. There’s something in there about unexpectedly becoming a parent, gender identity, the value of tolerance and diversity, nature versus mechanization, rejection of societal imperatives, head versus heart, and whatever the point of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is (that entire plot is subsumed within this story, except it’s a runt goose rather than a red-nosed reindeer). I’m surely missing something.

But it all becomes jumbled, and the ending is somewhat confusing. The movie seemed to be heading toward a message about breaking free from societal expectations and embracing individuality, particularly with Roz’s rebellious spirit and the goose’s unconventional upbringing. However, the ending felt disjointed because it reverted to the characters accepting their traditional roles. Roz ends up as what seems uncomfortably like a slave (especially after the movie established that the robot has a heart and is not simply an automaton). Likewise, the goose re-integrates into goose culture after all the development of his unique upbringing. Though neither seems unhappy, within the context of the movie I was wondering if we should consider them to have been broken. The island inhabitants as society, too, concluded that they could not win a protracted struggle against modernity in the form of killer robots sent to bring Roz back. So, while predator and prey were able to come to a truce for mutual survival through a bad winter, the collective settled on surrender against the foreign, mechanical enemy, which was appeased by sacrificing Roz back to them. The implications of the resolution seem at odds with the optimistic, affirming message of the rest of the movie.

This is not to say that Wild Robot was a dreary movie. Though obviously aimed at children, it was entertaining, beautifully animated, and never boring. It was designed to provoke emotional responses, and hey, it worked as intended on me.

So, while Wild Robot invites contemplation but then doesn’t seem to really meet its own challenge, I enjoyed watching it. Not my favorite movie of the year, but not a waste of time.

Rating: Two ghosts in the machine.