In an animation landscape full of sequels, prequels, and remakes, The Wild Robot is a welcome respite.
Based on Peter Brown’s eponymous 2016 novel and brought to the screen in painterly style, the film tells the story of a robot stranded on an island and forced to adapt to her woodland surroundings. Programmed to be helpful, she soon takes as her task raising a gosling and preparing him for an upcoming migration.
Reminiscent of Ice Age, Wall-E, and The Iron Giant, The Wild Robot speaks to the vocation of motherhood, the clashes between nature and technology, and climate change. It also beautifully demonstrates the humility involved in hospitality. For the Christian, it’s a reminder of the countercultural practice of welcome.
The robot, Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), is an outsider eager to help others in her newfound community. Fink (Pedro Pascal), a quick-witted fox, is an outcast. Brightbill (Kit Connor), Roz’s adopted gosling, is the lone survivor of an accident.
Often looked down on by the rest of the island’s creatures, the trio bonds over their “otherness” despite the unlikeliness of their friendship. As a fox, Fink is Brightbill’s would-be predator. As a robot, Roz can be dangerous. The other animals refer to Roz as “the monster”; from the film’s beginning, we see how easily (even accidentally) she can cause destruction.
But raising Brightbill requires the fox and the robot to set aside their “programming,” to strip themselves of preconceived notions of what’s natural. Fink has to disregard his nature as a predator; Roz has to recalibrate herself to take on her role as a mother. “Sometimes to survive,” she muses, “we must become more than we were programmed to be.”
Roz and Fink aren’t the creatures we assume would offer care to an orphaned bird. Their choice feels as unlikely as a Samaritan stopping to help an injured man on the side of the road, his physical needs overcoming any historical tension between people groups.
Hospitality is more than opening your home for dinner with friends, more than being kind when it happens to be convenient. Oftentimes, hospitality requires sacrifice. That sacrifice includes putting aside our grievances, spending time with people who aren’t like us, and even offering forgiveness.
In the second and third acts of The Wild Robot, Roz and Fink extend their hospitality to the creatures on the island that previously rejected them. Once Brightbill goes off with the other geese, her surrogate parents feel purposeless. Then, an unruly winter storm hits, and Roz immediately springs into action, attempting to save the freezing animals.
As predators and prey squeeze into tight, warm quarters, Fink reminds the group that the only way to survive the storm is to put aside their differences. He reminds them that Roz’s sacrifice is an act of undeserved grace. They rejected Roz as a monster; she responded by saving their lives. Moved by his speech, a beaver timidly cuddles with a bear.
The bear sleeps next to the beaver in the same way that the lion will sit next to a lamb and the leopard with the goat, the same way that our Savior sat next to tax collectors (Isa. 11:6, Mark 2:15–17). In The Wild Robot, as in the Christian life, unlikely associations are the very point.
In fact, our hospitality stems from the unlikeliest association of them all—an almighty God who involves himself with mere humans, who graciously intervenes on our behalf. The church extends hospitality to others because God extended hospitality to us (Ex. 22:21). As Colossians 4:5 puts it, “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity.”
The Wild Robot reminds us that if our hospitality comes with qualifications—political party, gender, race, whether we usually eat another animal for lunch—then we are allowing lesser things to get in the way of Jesus’ command to love God and our neighbors. To pick up other people’s crosses (Gal. 6:2–5), to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice (Rom. 12:15), we have to actually encounter one another. We can’t be the church without the countercultural sense that the things that reconcile us are greater than the things that divide us, whether ideologies or customs or mere social norms.
As the creatures in The Wild Robot encounter this reconciliation, they are changed and challenged. Hospitality changes the very nature of reality. It rewires a robot; it turns prey into a friend.
Mia Staub is editorial project manager at Christianity Today.
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