As our collective nervousness over AI grows each day, “The Wild Robot” emerges from the woods with a completely different take on a man-made being with the ability to learn. “I love the messaging of the story, the idea that kindness is a survival tactic,” says star Lupita Nyong’o. “It’s just so pure and sweet and needed.
” In the DreamWorks animated feature, a domestic helper robot, a ROZZUM 7134 (Nyong’o), is lost on a wooded island and activated without human guidance. As the ingeniously designed “Roz” searches for a mission in a vernal bower that looks designed by an Impressionist painter, she learns to communicate with the animal residents and finds purpose in raising an orphaned gosling, Brightbill. Director Chris Sanders, who adapted the script from Peter Brown’s book, says he was hooked by “the journey of a robot, Roz, who becomes a mother quite by accident, and doesn’t have the programming for that.
There’s a lot that I can relate to in that story. I think any parent can relate to that at some point. It’s a mother’s journey, and that’s unusual for an animated film.
” “What resonated for me was being in a totally new environment and having to figure things out,” says Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico and raised in Kenya. “I am an immigrant in America, and there’s an adaptation that I have had to undergo in order to gain my stride as a member of this society. Roz is an alien in this environment and in many ways she’s misunde.
